Personally I always use FreezeThaw for that kind of thing, but I believe they both work in a similar manner (you can also use Data::Dumper if you only want to use standard modules). FreezeThaw and Storable both have a freeze method which serialises a complex data structure and a thaw method which resurrects the original structure. You can therefore do something like this:

use Storable;
$serialized = freeze \%structure;
# Write $serialised to a file.

# Time passes

# Read $serialised from a file
%structure = %{thaw($serialized)};
[download]

If you want to store complex hashes in a DBM file then check out MLDBM on CPAN. It hides all this from you and works with Storable, FreezeThaw and Data::Dumper.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>