Rea: DBM problem

[baku]

If you're concerned about disc space, though, I'm going to assume that the files are very large, ergo, unlikely to fit in memory... you'd likely want to do something like:

dbmopen %ORIG, "original", 0666 or die;
dbmopen %NOVA, "new", 0666 or die;
# -- race condition start
for my $key (keys %ORIG)
{
 $NOVA{$key} = $ORIG{$key};
}
dbmclose %ORIG;
dbmclose %NOVA;
unlink "original"
link "new", "original"
# race condition end
unlink "new";

So long as no-one else needs to get at your DBM while you're "shrinking" it, the above will work.

[japhy]

But keys() will still build quite a large list. You may prefer while (my($k,$v) = each %hash) instead.

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker

[baku]

Better yet :-)

[merlyn]

That won't work unless you know how to turn "new" into the actual list of files involved for that database. Perhaps "new.db", or even "new.dir" and "new.page".

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker