The project I am working on requires a Berkely DB even though I prefer DBI/MySQL/Oracle or even DBI/CSV solutions. I need to limit the the data returned two to rows even if more match the query - Using a DBI/SQL solution I would just state: LIMIT = 2. Any ideas as to how to do this in Perl 5 (RH Linux 6.2) would be much appreciated - I'm not all that great with the "sort" function. some ugly sample code:

my ($cur_day, $cur_mon, $cur_yr) = (localtime())[3,4,5];
$cur_mon++;
$cur_yr+=1900;
my $cur_date=sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", $cur_yr, $cur_mon, $cur_day);

my $limit = 2;

do {
   foreach my $event_id (sort { $Sorts{$sortBy}->() } keys (%database)
+)  {
      my ($event_date_1, $event_title_1, $venue, $series, $style) =
         split(/\0/, $database{$event_id});
      if ($event_date_1 >= $cur_date) {
         &getRandFeature;
        &Generate_Parsed_File();
   }
}
} until ( $limit );

# code in debug mode
"test2.pl" 180 lines, 4953 characters
   print "rand_int =" . "$rand_int\n";
   print "rand_int2 =" . "$rand_int2\n";
   my @index_db = %fdatabase;
   my @index_db2 = %database;
#   if ($index_db2[$rand_int2] > $limit) {
#   return(2);
#   }
#   else {
   print "array element:" . "$index_db2[$rand_int2]\n";
   print "array element:" . "$index_db[$rand_int]\n";
#   }
}

sub Generate_Parsed_File
  {
#  my $tmplFName = shift;
#  my $outFName = shift;
  my $Parameters = shift;
  open (OUT_FILE, "< $tmplFName")
    or die ("WARNING: Could not locate '$tmplFName': $!\n");
  $_ = join('', <OUT_FILE>);
  s/<!-- ::(.+?):: -->/${$Parameters}{$1}/gs;
  s/::(.+?)::/${$Parameters}{$1}/gs;
  open (NEW_FILE, "> $outFName")
      or die ("WARNING: Could not locate '$outFName': $!\n");
  print NEW_FILE $_;
  close (OUT_FILE);
  close (NEW_FILE);
  }
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Thanks in advance - I'm no computer scientist, perl is my first programming language and up to a year ago I only wrote shell scripts.. sean