use Storable;
 store \%table, 'file';
 $hashref = retrieve('file');
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my %host_info = %{retrieve('file')};
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Storable works great for me! Thanks to a five year old post.

perl -e '
use Storable;
my $hashfile="file.hash";
store {}, $hashfile unless -r $hashfile;
my $hash=retrieve($hashfile);
print join(",", %$hash), "\n";
$hash->{"index"}++;
store $hash, $hashfile;
'
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For using data dumper all you havev to do in order to get the data back is use eval to recreate the data structure. Also of note you should also set $Data::Dumper::Purity to 1 if you have nested references

Here is a example:

#Save
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Purity = 1;
open FILE, ">$outfile" or die "Can't open '$outfile':$!";
print FILE Data::Dumper->Dump([$main], ['*main']);
close FILE;
#restore
open FILE, $infile;
undef $/;
eval <FILE>;
close FILE;
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Take a look at XML::Simple. It does exactly what you want:

use XML::Simple;

my $options = XMLin ('teams.badDB') if -e 'teams.badDB';

# do stuff with $options
$options->{'time'} = 15 * 60 if ! exists $options->{'time'};
$options->{'width'} = 200 if ! exists $options->{'width'};
# ...

open outFile, '>', 'teams.badDB';
print outFile XMLout ($options);
close outFile;
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You might also wish to have a look at this, which provides an overview of some of the options for serializing data structures.

HTH,

  my $hostname = 'foo.bar.example.com'
  use Cache::FileCache;
  my $cache = new Cache::FileCache( { 'namespace' => 'HostInfo',
                                      'default_expires_in' => 600 } );
  my $cacheKey = $hostname;
  my $host_info = $cache->get( $cacheKey );
  if ( not defined $host_info )
  {
    $customer = get_host_info_as_hashref( $hostname );
    $cache->set( $cacheKey, $host_info, "10 minutes" );
  }
  return $host_info;
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Hello dear Monks,

first thanks for you answers.

I first tried : (cos it's the shortest)

use Storable;
 # fill my hash
 store \%host_info, 'file';
 %host_info = ();
 %host_info = %{retrieve('file')};
 # print my hash
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This worked. Don't know what I did yesterday, when I used

store \%host_info, 'file';

(probably not exactly that) It had a file with just

pst01234(and some unprintable chars).
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Maybe I should not code until 6am.

Thank you all.

Have a nice day !

"There is only one good, namely knowledge, and only one evil, namely ignorance." Socrates

The output that Storable produces is not meant to be human-readable. So it's probably true that whatever you were doing worked just fine. You just have to sort of trust (or test it) that when you read it back in using retrieve it'll come out ok.