DBM Portability?

[Anonymous Monk]

I'm doing some work with DBM (dbmopen), and I've run into an issue with portability. I made some DBMs on my "development" computer, and will be moving them to another computer shortly. I tested one of the files out on my primary computer to make sure it'd work okay. Nothing fancy here, just single-dimensional, non-nested hash. When I try to access an element through a known key (in this case, the key is "subject"), I get an error from Perl:

bash-2.05a$ perl
dbmopen(%DBM,"someDBM",undef) or die "$!\n";
print $DBM{subject},"\n";
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/lib/perl5/i386-
+linux/DB_File.pm line 262.
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/lib/perl5/i386-
+linux/DB_File.pm line 262.

The DBM is accessed just fine through my development computer. It's Slackware 8.0; my primary computer (the one that it fails on) is Slack 8.1. Both are running Perl 5.6.1 with nothing added on (except for the LWP modules). Anyone know why it's not opening for me? Do I need to change something? Maybe a different implementation? (I've heard something about IDBM, SDBM, but can't find any documentation that gives me relevant information.)

Thanks!