Okay my problem is when trying to use a dbm file from my system on another, which may be a completely different operating system, the file will not work because of the different version libraries installed or whatnot, so I came up with the 2 scripts below. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DB_File;

die "usage: dview <file.db> <outputfile>\n" unless (@ARGV == 2);
my($db_file, $out_file) = @ARGV;

die "Error: $!\n" unless -e $db_file;
die "Output file exists\n" if -e $out_file;

open OUT_FILE, ">$out_file" or die "Couldn't open $out_file: $!\n";
dbmopen my %DB, "$db_file", 0666 or die "Couldn't open DB: $!\n";
for (sort keys %DB) {
    print OUT_FILE "key: \"$_\" = \"$DB{$_}\" END\n";
}
dbmclose %DB or warn "Couldn't close $db_file: $!\n";
close OUT_FILE or warn "Couldn't close $out_file: $!\n";

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That one would dump the contents of the dbm file's hash values into a plain text file and with that plain text file I would create another dbm file with this other script 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DB_File;

die "usage: dbcreate-dump <file> <out.db>\n" unless (@ARGV == 2);
my($in_file, $out_db) = @ARGV;

die "Error: $!\n" unless -e $in_file;
die "Output DB exists\n" if -e $out_db;

local $/;
open IN_FILE, "< $in_file" or die "Couldn't open $in_file: $!\n";
my $file_contents = <IN_FILE>;
close IN_FILE or warn "Couldn't close $in_file: $!\n";

dbmopen my %DB, "$out_db", 0666 or die "Couldn't open DB: $!\n";
while($file_contents =~ /key: \"(.*)\" = \"(.*)\" END/g) {
    $DB{$1} = $2;
}
dbmclose %DB or warn "Couldn't close $out_db: $!\n";

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But all that seems a little over complicated I thought when I remembered Data::Dumper and maybe using it dump the values into a plain text file and eval that or something. But the something is where I'm stuck I have no idea how to achive this using Data::Dumper, so far I've tried 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DB_File;
use Data::Dumper;
dbmopen my %NEWS_DB, "news.db", 0666 or die "Couldn't open news.db: $!
+\n";
my $news_db = \%NEWS_DB;
my $data = Dumper $news_db;
dbmopen my %NEW_DB, "new.db", 0666 or die "Couldn't open new.db: $!\n"
+; 
%NEW_DB = eval(Dumper($data));

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Of course that doesn't work and the Data::Dumper man page just confuses me even more :( so any help would be greatly appreciated.

In reply to DBM files between systems by rendler

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