I'm using Storable.pm as a kind of homegrown database for phone numbers and small bits of data. It works great and it's very portable which I like. But I'd like to store entire text files in a hash too. I've been reticent to do this because I thought it would be more efficient (in terms of memory) to save the PATH to a file, rather than the contents of a file. this:

$essays{'Emerson'} = "/usr/foo/american_lit/emerson/";
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instead of this:

$essays{'Emerson'} = "The American Scholar 
from Addresses, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson 

An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, 
+August
31, 1837 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, 

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversa
+ry is one
of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games o
+f
strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and ode
+s, like
the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Trouba
+dours;
nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the Bri
+tish and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly si
+gn of the
survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to l
+etters
any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible ins
+tinct.
announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?... etc.
+";
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This goes on for several pages. Obviously, the second way will create a bigger hash, but it's also much more portable as I just have to copy the file created by storable to have ALL the essays I've stored. This seems to be what you did in your post. And you mentioned putting the data from THOUSANDS of files into a stored hash. Can I do this with lock_store and lock_retrieve? Doesn't that mean that when you lock_retrieve that stored file you'll be reading EVERYTHING in memory? That can't be good, can it? The problem I'm having with the path solution is portability across different machines.