http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=157439

Dave05 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Peace be upon the Monksters;

I have a simple (or so I thought) class ('FileHash') that ties a hash to a file, reading data into the hash upon instantiation, and writing the hash out to the file when DESTROYed.

I want to use the class for several hashes e.g.

my (%pwds, %boxes); tie (%pwds, 'FileHash', "$dir/pwds"); tie (%boxes, 'FileHash', "$dir/boxes");
but the second call to tie clears out any data that may have been read into the first hash and replaces it with the data from the second hash.

I just can't get my head around why this happens.

Here is the code for my class:

package FileHash; use strict; use warnings; use Tie::Hash; use Data::Dumper; our @ISA = ("Tie::Hash"); sub TIEHASH { my ($class, $file) = @_; my $s = {}; $s->{DATA} = _read($file) || {}; $s->{FILE} = $file; bless $s, $class; } sub STORE { $_[0]->{DATA}{$_[1]} = $_[2] } sub CLEAR { $_[0]->{DATA} = () } sub FETCH { $_[0]->{DATA}{$_[1]} } sub FIRSTKEY { my $a = scalar keys %{$_[0]}; each %{$_[0]->{DATA}} } sub NEXTKEY { each %{$_[0]->{DATA}} } sub EXISTS { exists $_[0]->{DATA}{$_[1]} } sub DELETE { delete $_[0]->{DATA}{$_[1]} } sub DESTROY { _write ($_[0]) } # ----- private subs ----- sub _write { # still need to deal with race conditions my %data = %{$_[0]->{DATA}}; my $file = $_[0]->{FILE} ; open (FH, "> $file") or die "Can't open $file for FileHash _write: +$!"; print FH Data::Dumper->Dump([\%data], ['*data']); close FH or die "Can't close $file for FileHash _write: $!"; } sub _read { # still need to deal with race conditions no strict; my $file = shift; return undef unless -f $file; unless (my $ret = do $file) { warn "couldn't parse $file: $@" if $@; warn "couldn't do $file: $!" unless defined $ret; } return \%data; } 1;