I was once looking for the same thing you are, I never found anything adequate, there are a couple of things on CPAN, but I think they we either very limited, or required you to purchase proprietary libraries.

Don't fret yet, You can find the file format for dbase files (and just about anything else) at www.wotsit.org, this is a GREAT site. I planned on writing a module to manipulate dbase III dbs but have never had the time, so I still have to use FoxPro w/ Perl (yuck). I really do not think that it would be difficult to write a good module to do this, and I am surprised that there is not one already (If someone finds/makes one, I would love to hear about it). It would just take a bit of time and testing.

tigervamp