You have lots of ground to cover before giving up on dbmopen. You might try putting in an 'or die "failed: $!"' and have dbmopen give you the reason it failed. But which database are you using, where is the db etc. Should 'param' be %param?

try (sorry you'll have to link yourself):

DBI 'home page': http://www.arcana.co.uk/technologia/perl/DBI
       
        Master archive site for Perl DB information:
            ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/perl/db/
        Mailing list archive:                /DBI/perldb-interest/
       
        Searchable index of the dbi-users mailing list:
        http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~faq/lists/dbiusers/
       
        mysql home page: http://www.tcx.se

I didn't have much luck looking for dbmopen syntax on cpan, but everything there uses tie to tie a hash/array to a dbm file.

But perldoc -f dbmopen says:

among other things
    # print out history file offsets
    dbmopen(%HIST,'/usr/lib/news/history',0666);
    while (($key,$val) = each %HIST) {
        print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n";
    }
    dbmclose(%HIST);

so param should at least be %param and it should be the hash you want connected/tied (perldoc also says dbmopen is outdated, use tie) to the dbm. I'm guessing you have a few other things not working too.

HtH

a