I've written a script to parse Apache logs containing cookie data. It enables me to count the number of users and the number of requests they made by populating a hash as I iterate through the log (e.g. $users{$cookie}++;).

The problem I have got is that, because I am using the cookiestring as the hash key it is of unknown length. Now, the only cookie that we set is ~ 30-40 characters but I have run across a couple of instances where Netscrape has dumped the entire cookie file instead of just returning our one. One particular instance led to a would-be key length of ~ 3.5Kb - would-be if SDBM had not shat its pants and ran away crying like a baby!

Is this a bug in SDBM or is there a max key length? If it is SDBM then does anyone know whether any of the other DBM implementations suffer from this problem.

p.s. I am not sitting here wondering how to shorten the string - just curious as to the key length issue.

In reply to SDBM or Perl hash key length restrictions by larryk

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