Standard Modules (Programming Perl)

25.7. Standard Modules

In general, the standard modules (modules bundled with Perl) work on all platforms. Notable exceptions are the CPAN.pm module (which currently makes connections to external programs that may not be available), platform-specific modules (such as ExtUtils::MM_VMS), and DBM modules.

There is no single DBM module available on all platforms. SDBM_File and the others are generally available on all Unix and DOSish ports, but not in MacPerl, where only NBDM_File and DB_File are available.

The good news is that at least one DBM module should be available, and AnyDBM_File will use whichever module it can find. With such uncertainty, you should use only the features common to all DBM implementations. For instance, keep your records to no more than 1K bytes. See the AnyDBM_File module documentation for more details.