I've been using some old perl scripts for years now that manipulate some databases. These perl scripts all open the database using the line: 

dbmopen(%DATA, "filename", 0600) || die "Darn!";

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On my Linux server, this line creates or opens a single "filename.db" file. Great. I don't really care what is going on under the covers at this point. I'm just happy that it works!

The problem occurred when I recently tried to port my old perl scripts over to Windows and ran into some trouble. (Surprise!) I got apache and perl running easily enough on Windows 2000, and my perl script even ran the first time I tried it in the Apache cgi-bin! But my script didn't find any records in the database. (I had already binary ftp'd the filename.db file from the Linux server to the appropriate place on the Windows machine.) But when I executed my perl script, it appeared to ignore the filename.db file and it created two files ... filename.dir and filename.pag

I'm pretty stupid about the different database formats, so could anyone tell me how to force my Windows Perl install to open and modify the filename.db file instead of these new dir/pag files.

Thanks for any newbie advise you can give,
Kurt (kleucht)

In reply to newbie: DB versus DIR/PAG database files by kleucht

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