The interesting thing is that with the edits the restored data structure store/retrieves just fine! Forgot to mention that. There must be an extra byte or two in the original that is triggering the behaviour but where....and what.....

Without a test case data structure it is like looking for a very small haystack in an enormous pile of needles! Did I mention I did not like the author's macro mania much yet ;-) As soon as you have a test case (and the croak will get you one provided you test and save it) it should be relatively easy to track down the issue(s)

Storable is a module I use all the time, as do many others. We can all do without it randomly crashing. Good luck.

It was very thoughtful of you to edit the data. ++ for that. I presume you worked your way through it with a hex editor as I don't see how you could have done it with a regex. If you did manage to do it with REs please explain ;-)

I edited the storable with... vim!!!! :P I actually did a range search and replace with vim and it worked like a charm. When looking at the file within vim, you can see hints of the data structure (scalars, arrays, and hashes). Along with running 'strings' against it, I was able to see what might be sensitive data and my intent was to censor it while keeping a storable that would reproduce the error.

The lesson I learned was that I needed to keep the string length the exact same as the orginal file (which now makes perfect sense knowing that there are read length markers before each string).

Before a Storable was a kind of mystical thing that just worked, and its really strange (for me anyway) to now be able to "see" and somewhat understand the file in a hex editor.

I also applied your "patch" with vim as well, I removed the 7 characters you suggested and found another 0x05 entry in the file and yanked an pasted it in place. Then I ran my test case code and the damn thing thawed :) (I've did attempt to use an hex editor on my power book with little success because I've never really used one before). Anyway, vim++ :P

-biz-

You can use bvi which is binary vi if you want to make life easier!

cheers

tachyon