maybe too early in the morning and low coffeine level still, but.. what's wrong with Storable#EXAMPLES?

use Storable qw(store retrieve freeze thaw dclone);
 
%color = ('Blue' => 0.1, 'Red' => 0.8, 'Black' => 0, 'White' => 1);
 
store(\%color, 'mycolors') or die "Can't store %a in mycolors!\n";
 
$colref = retrieve('mycolors');
die "Unable to retrieve from mycolors!\n" unless defined $colref;
printf "Blue is still %lf\n", $colref->{'Blue'};
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L*