Have you looked at Storable or FreezeThaw? Often these alternatives have the disadvantage that upgrading to a new version of the module may break compatability, meaning you'll no longer be able to retrieve the old files.

Otherwise, you'll have to pack and unpack the entries you care about yourself.

thanks, I guess i will have to experiment

Er, less tersely, 'Storable' is the package you are thinking of.

There are various ways to keep persistent data. DBM::Deep is a recent and popular module, but are various other DBM sorts of modules out there that deal with hashes, like MLDBM, DB_File, or GDBM_File. Storable is another option.

If you haven't stored references as hash values, you can use my $box = pack "(Z*)*", %hash; to deflate the hash and my %hash = unpack "(Z*)*", $box; to inflate it again.

If your data contains nul bytes or you need to avoid them altogether you'll want a pack format with a counter, such as (A8/A*)* maybe, which will consume more space and impose a limit on the maximum length of keys and values.

Both of those will turn undef values into empty strings.

If you have nested data structures, implementing your own gets complex quick; see aforementioned posts for suggestions.

It all depends on your needs.

Makeshifts last the longest.