Sorry to have completed pissed you off. It's ironical that I know it is an XY problem, yet I do not know what X and Y are...Anyways, after looking at all the responses, I wanted to know more about tying hashes and being able to override methods like STORE, FETCH, etc. to make them work for my multi-dimensional hash. But I haven't used OO-Perl before so I am struggling to write my own recursive methods to make it work for multi-level structures. I will go with YAML. It looks a lot more elegant than perl hashes in a file.