For real speed and scalability, you'll need an RDBMS, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, or some such; use DBI to access it, and when you're feeling up to it, mod_perl and Apache::DBI to manage connections to the DBMS. If you're avoiding this kind of setup, learn how to use it. You'll thank yourself later.

That said, right now you can probably use a DBM interface, which along with tie allows you to manipulate a file as if it were a hash; the keys could be user names and the values could be split - able strings that contain the user information. You'll have to pay close attention to things like file locking, however (which you'll have to do now already, and is one *very* good reason to use a DBMS, IMO).

Check out DB_File and or do a search on CPAN for "DBM" and see what pops up.

HTH

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp $n = <STDIN>; $r
+ose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$other
+_name\n"'
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