Hello fellow monks, I am trying to create a hash of keys from usernames, and each key would contain a hash of details. When I do it this way it works fine:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my %users;
$users{mulander}->{email} = 'netprobe@gmail.com';
print "$users{mulander}->{email}\n";
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I would like to store the data using dbmopen so I tried:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
dbmopen my %users,'users',664;
$users{mulander}->{email} = 'netprobe@gmail.com';
print "$users{mulander}->{email}\n";
dbmclose %users;
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But when I do that, I keep getting this error:

Can't use string ("HASH(0x1865480)") as a HASH ref while "strict refs"
+ in use
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I wonder why does this work fine when used on a ordinardy hash and fails when I open the hash via dbmopen? What am I doing wrong? Is a dbmopen hash different than an ordinary hash? And if so should I use another method to tie this data structure to a file? ( maybe Tie::Scalar or something? ).
I gone through perldoc and Beginning Perl and unfortunetly did not find the anwser, maybe one of you brothers could enlighten me.
Thanks in advance.