[Dxspider-support] External Command showdx not working. Another way to do?

[John Spigel]

Sysops,
Im trying to get the external showdx command to work, but I get an error 
message from Prefix.PM

(*) Spot::init - reading in 2 days of spots into cache
Can't call method "get" on an undefined value at /spider/perl/Prefix.pm 
line 216
, <GEN1> line 1.

This did work on a vintage node. I directed the output to text files 
with periodic crontab updates. I suspect that the innumerable changes in 
Prefix.pm to accommodate the crazy callsigns causes this blip. Is there 
a ready way to do this? Or a simple tweak in the code to assign a 
default value?

Used to work like below. I do have really the old node running just to 
collect these spots and in a hurry to pull the plug. Is there a new, 
ready to go, way to do this?

sysop at DxSpider:~/spider/perl$ ./showdx on 40m
   7049.1  YO3FJM       3-Feb-2023 0223Z FT4                          
<K4WMS>
   7129.0  W1AW/5       3-Feb-2023 0221Z  VOTA / Texas                  
<N0TR>
   7074.6  IN3EJX       3-Feb-2023 0220Z                               
<KF0GE>
   7047.5  VE3KAE       3-Feb-2023 0219Z  73 tks                       
<EA5UB>
   7047.5  KN4QHZ       3-Feb-2023 0218Z  73 tks                       
<EA5UB>
   7190.0  W1AW/4       3-Feb-2023 0218Z  LSB KP13eh -> EM83          
<OH6BQH>
   7047.5  W4CPO        3-Feb-2023 0217Z  73 tks                       
<EA5UB>
   7047.5  NS2X         3-Feb-2023 0215Z  73 tks                       
<EA5UB>
   7047.5  WB9WOZ       3-Feb-2023 0215Z  73 tks                       
<EA5UB>
   7074.8  LX2KD        3-Feb-2023 0215Z                                
<N8IK>

73, John W1AN