DBM::Deep seems to fail the first of your criteria for good software, though... unless something is screwy with my installation. *shrug*

DBM::Deep sounds like it should do exactly what I want, but for the life of me I can't get it to work. I have copied line-for-line the script in the link in my original post that someone else was able to use for exactly the same task as my application, but it won't run. It gets killed during the cleanup stage with the error "Can't use an undefined value as a HASH reference in DBM/Deep/Hash.pm line 33."

I have all the dependencies for DBM::Deep (and sub-dependencies) installed. I have made sure all of the versions are compatible. I don't have any other unnecessary Perl modules running. What's causing the "undefined value" error?

Reading through some basic Perl tutorials online, I can see how the DBM::Deep scripts I copied should be working fine. I'm getting the sinking feeling, though, that I'm missing some simple change (like changing a *insert your local name here* type of reference in the example code to what it should actually be for my application; maybe the {foo} reference? I don't know) that should be obvious. It doesn't seem like the global destruction issue should be popping up and killing my scripts like it's doing.