I realise that you are trying to be helpful; but I do not think you have thought this through.

• Firstly, the OP clearly states Hash of Arrays.

  Hence, catering for anything more is overkill.

• More importantly, the OPs code clearly shows that he needs to build up the arrays piecemeal -- ie. value by value.

  If he were to use a serialiser module for this, he would need to deserialise the current state of the appropriate array; add the latest new element; and then re-serialise; for each line in the file. Which would be horribly slow no matter which of the serialiser alternatives he used.

  The only other alternative would be to wait until each array was complete in memory before serialising and adding to DB_File, but that would mean waiting until the entire file had been read, and thus, the entire structure would be required to be hend in memory before serialisation could be performed. And if he had the memory to do that, he wouldn't be looking to use a disk-based hash.

For a one-off process, he might consider pre-sorting the input file by the key field, so that the contents of each (sub) array could be built up in memory before being serialised once, but for that to be a viable option requires a whole set of circumstances that are not in evidence from the OP.