Why not just a hash tied to a Berkeley DB database instead of messing with Storable and huge files?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Carp;
use File::Slurp;
use BerkeleyDB;

my %html_files;
my $totalSize = 0;
my $fileName = 'brick';

my $db  = tie %html_files, 'BerkeleyDB::Hash',
 -Filename => $fileName,
 -Flags => DB_CREATE;
die "can't open db: $!\n" if ! $db;

opendir TD, '.' or croak $!;

foreach my $file (readdir TD) {
 next if $file eq $fileName;
  my $fileData = read_file($file);
  $html_files{$file} = $fileData;
  $totalSize += length($fileData);
}

print "Stored $totalSize bytes\n";

exit 0; # 'good' exit for the shell
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