"Seem to" dominate? The very meaning of the name of Perl suggests it would be predominately focused on sequential text files.

That said, and DBM::Deep already mentioned, if you want to spin your own module to support what we in the dinosaur days would have called Fixed-Length Random Access File processes, you could look into the following features of Perl:

Input and output functions:

• binmode
• read
• seek
• sysread
• sysseek
• syswrite
• tell
• write

Modern data processing (is that an oxymoron?) thinks more in terms of XML and DB for re-usable, rewriteable data; but if you must play in the old fashioned fixed-length random-access file space, the above tools will readily permit migration of your old C code where you last reinvented that wheel to Perl where you seem fixated on this somewhat dated approach to data storage.

:-)

All that having been said, I myself could not resist the urge to port my old FLRAF routines to Perl when I first got here. I never bothered to write a module I would dare to put in front of other software engineers, however, since I knew going into the effort it was an exercise to produce a tool I was unlikely to ever need.

DBI/SQLite has been a good friend:

use DBI;

my $dbargs = 
{
    AutoCommit => 0,
    PrintError => 1
};

my $dbscns = "dbi:SQLite:dbname=$Db_dbn";
&debug::debug("\$dbscns = '$dbscns\n");

my $dbshan = DBI->connect($dbscns,"","",$dbargs);
&debug::debug("\$dbshan = '$dbshan'\n");
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