What merlyn said. Also a warning. AnyDBM_File is just a wrapper around other dbm solutions. Those solutions vary widely in quality, for instance the one that comes with Perl (SDBM_File) cannot handle arbitrary amounts of data. Therefore code that may work on one machine may not on another.

Even worse, the actual dbm files created have a binary format that depends upon what is installed locally. They will not be portable from machine to machine, and if you install a better package (eg DB_File) you may suddenly find yourself incompatible with your own data.

So for any production use I would steer you away from AnyDBM_File and towards a known good solution like DB_File.