Perl Monks-

Reading How do I save a nested structure to a file (and read it later)? gives me several different ways to save a data structure to a file. I'm hoping for some advice on which might be the best to use for my particular application.

I have a perl script that runs commands on remote hosts. I want the user to generate their own list of login@hostnames so the GUI can provide them with a drop-down list to select from every time they run the script. This implies I need to save the data to a file.

Some users will just use the GUI menus to build their list, but I imagine others may want to simply edit the file directly, since it will be faster for bulk additions.

Assuming the save file is in human readable format (say I use Data::Dumper), how do I protect against clever little users who may assume I just eval the whole file in (I'm assuming I need to worry about this, don't I)? However, if I use Storable or FreezeThaw, they will loose the ability to edit the file directly (is that really true?). In this case I could always write a seperate bulk-transfer utility, but that seems awkward.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

-Craig

In reply to Restoring a Data Structure from a File by cmv

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