Hi bobf,

I’ve not used this module before, but in playing around with your code I’ve made the following observations:

(1) Your results are duplicated on my system, which is Strawberry Perl 5.14.2 running on Vista 32-bit.

(2) If I add a call to Data::Dumper like so:

use Data::Dumper;

...

{
    my $db = DBM::Deep->new( $db_file );
    $db->{key} = {};
    print "Dump: ", Dumper($db);
}
[download]

then href_nocopy fails with the same permission denied error as for href_copy.

(3) If I add $db->clear(); before the call to unlink, the permission denied errors go away:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBM::Deep;
use Data::Dumper;

use constant DUMP => 0;  # 1 for debugging

{
    my $db_file = 'href_nocopy';

    {
        my $db = DBM::Deep->new( $db_file );
        $db->{key} = {};
        print "Dump: ", Dumper($db)    if DUMP;

        $db->clear();
    }

    print "\nDeleting $db_file\n";
    unlink( $db_file ) or warn $!;      # succeeds

    $db_file = 'href_copy';

    {
        my $db = DBM::Deep->new( $db_file );
        $db->{key} = {};
        my $db2 = $db->{key};

        print "\nDump: ", Dumper($db)  if DUMP;
        print   "Dump: ", Dumper($db2) if DUMP;

        $db->clear();
    }

    print "\nDeleting $db_file\n";
    unlink( $db_file ) or warn $!;      # now succeeds!

    $db_file = 'nonref_copy';

    {
        my $db = DBM::Deep->new( $db_file );
        $db->{key} = 1;
        my $db2 = $db->{key};

        print "\nDump: ", Dumper($db)  if DUMP;
        print   "Dump: ", Dumper($db2) if DUMP;

        $db->clear();
    }

    print "\nDeleting $db_file\n";
    unlink( $db_file ) or warn $!;      # succeeds
}
[download]

I don’t know what is going on, but maybe the above observations will help?

Regards,