If this post looks like the last post, the problem is that it's too long.

If you produced a minimal example that demonstrates the problem you have a chance of people looking at it - I personally have no intention of struggling through the mass that you've included - and there is in fact a good chance that you'll discover the problem yourself in the process. If nothing else, it would at least show an honest attempt to resolve the issue prior to coming here.

I personally am pretty suspicious of:

tie %chat, "Tie::IxHash";
# other stuff
tie %chat, 'SDBM_File', $chat, O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 0644;
[download]

Tying the same hash to 2 different classes looks odd. I think most likely the last tie takes effect and the previous ones don't matter.

update

I tested some with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Tie::IxHash;

require SDBM_File;

my %chat;

my $chat = "./list.dbm";                 # location of database

tie %chat, "Tie::IxHash";

print tied(%chat), "\n";

tie(%chat, 'SDBM_File', $chat, O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 0666) 
     or die "Couldn’t tie SDBM file '$chat' $!; aborting";;

if ( !tied %chat ) {
   print "database unsuccessful $!.\n";
}

print tied(%chat), "\n";
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Because of the first tie of %chat, your original if (!tied %chat) does not capture failure of the second tie (to SDBM_File). the 'or die' idiom as part of the 'tie..' is better for this. On my system, the tie to SDBM_File would (often) fail if 'use Fcntl;' wasn't included at the top of the script.



--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com