HI monks, I have posted this 2 days back, tried a lot of options, but couldnt figure out what the problem was. Here is a little piece of code, it can't open the file access.db. The DB_file1.8.6 is in perl5.8.1 and I have db4 on mandrake9. i read the documentation for db_file, and i felt i had all the requirements.

use AnyDBM_File;
use DB_File;
use DirHandle;
use FileHandle;

dbmopen(%TEST, "/home/lab/access.db", 0666) or die "Can't open access 
+file: $!";
print "test1 \n";

while (($key,$val) = each %TEST) {
    print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n";
    print "test2";
    }

dbmclose(%TEST);
print "test3";
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the output is test1 test3. its not entering the while loop. no compilation errors either. file to be opened has the permissions 0666. can anyone help me with this please, I have my deadline here pretty soon.Thanks in advance. Update1: hi bmann, thanx for the suggestion. it worked, it printed out some output like

test1 
test_key = 2412538716
test2 test3
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But, The access.db had a long string inserted in it. Someone else created it. How can I print that data??