note dragonchild That's odd. There should be a UTF-8 test, but I've never used UTF-8 with DBM::Deep. In theory, you should be able to pass the filehandle in and there <b>are</b> tests for that. Per our email, please send me a failing test. the repos is at [http://github.com/robkinyon/dbm-deep] <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-85580"> <hr> My criteria for good software: <ol> <li>Does it work? <li>Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced? </ol> </div></div> 830137 830137