short of writing for both .db and .dir/.pag can a monk enlighten me?

There's no easy answer to this one. The file extension is going to depend on the versio of DBM that Perl is linked with. If you're only worried about the pair of platforms, set $extension based on testing $^O (OSNAME). And you can avoid the overhead of open() by using -f.

In reply to Re: dbmopen - if db file do this else do that by dws
in thread dbmopen - if db file do this else do that by Anonymous Monk

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