Perl DBM Functions

dbmclose(ASSOC_ARRAY)
dbmclose ASSOC_ARRAY
Breaks the binding between a dbm file and an associative array. The values remaining in the associative array are meaningless unless you happen to want to know what was in the cache for the dbm file. This function is only useful if you have ndbm.
dbmopen(ASSOC,DBNAME,MODE)
This binds a dbm or ndbm file to an associative array. ASSOC is the name of the associative array. (Unlike normal open, the first argument is NOT a filehandle, even though it looks like one). DBNAME is the name of the database (without the `.dir' or `.pag' extension). If the database does not exist, it is created with protection specified by MODE (as modified by the umask). If your system only supports the older dbm functions, you may perform only one dbmopen in your program. If your system has neither dbm nor ndbm, calling dbmopen produces a fatal error. Values assigned to the associative array prior to the dbmopen are lost. A certain number of values from the dbm file are cached in memory. By default this number is 64, but you can increase it by preallocating that number of garbage entries in the associative array before the dbmopen. You can flush the cache if necessary with the reset command. If you don't have write access to the dbm file, you can only read associative array variables, not set them. If you want to test whether you can write, either use file tests or try setting a dummy array entry inside an eval, which will trap the error. Note that functions such as keys() and values() may return huge array values when used on large dbm files. You may prefer to use the each() function to iterate over large dbm files. Example:

# print out history file offsets
dbmopen(HIST,'/usr/lib/news/history',0666);
while (($key,$val) = each %HIST) {
print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n";
}
dbmclose(HIST);