Storable 2.06 Copyright (c) 1995-2000, Raphael Manfredi Copyright (c) 2001,2002, Larry Wall ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl 5 itself. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the Perl 5 License schemes for more details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ +======================================================================= | Storable is distributed as a module, but is also part of the official | Perl core distribution, as of perl 5.8. | Maintenance is now done by the perl5-porters. We thank Raphael | Manfredi for providing us with this very useful module. +======================================================================= The Storable extension brings persistency to your data. You may recursively store to disk any data structure, no matter how complex and circular it is, provided it contains only SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH (possibly tied) and references (possibly blessed) to those items. At a later stage, or in another program, you may retrieve data from the stored file and recreate the same hiearchy in memory. If you had blessed references, the retrieved references are blessed into the same package, so you must make sure you have access to the same perl class than the one used to create the relevant objects. There is also a dclone() routine which performs an optimized mirroring of any data structure, preserving its topology. Objects (blessed references) may also redefine the way storage and retrieval is performed, and/or what deep cloning should do on those objects. To compile this extension, run: perl Makefile.PL [PERL_SRC=...where you put perl sources...] make make install There is an embeded POD manual page in Storable.pm. Storable was written by Raphael Manfredi Maitainance is now done by the perl5-porters Please e-mail us with problems, bug fixes, comments and complaints, although if you have complements you should send them to Raphael. Please don't e-mail Raphael with problems, as he no longer works on Storable, and your message will be delayed while he forwards it to us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thanks to (in chronological order): Jarkko Hietaniemi Ulrich Pfeifer Benjamin A. Holzman Andrew Ford Gisle Aas Jeff Gresham Murray Nesbitt Albert N. Micheev Marc Lehmann Justin Banks Jarkko Hietaniemi (AGAIN, as perl 5.7.0 Pumpkin!) for their contributions. A Japanese translation of this man page is available at the Japanized Perl Resources Project . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The perl5-porters would like to thank Raphael Manfredi According to the perl5.8 Changes file, the following people have helped bring you this Storable release: Abhijit Menon-Sen Andreas J. Koenig Archer Sully Craig A. Berry Dan Kogai Doug MacEachern Gurusamy Sarathy H.Merijn Brand Jarkko Hietaniemi Mark Bixby Michael Stevens Mike Guy Nicholas Clark Peter J. Farley III Peter Prymmer Philip Newton Raphael Manfredi Robin Barker Radu Greab Tim Bunce VMSperlers Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes If I've missed you out, please accept my apologies, and e-mail your patch to perl5-porters@perl.org.