In the git branch "f_dir-ref" (a wrong name now, as we changed some things in the development process), you can find a new extension
DBD::File now understands a new attribute f_dir_search: f_dir_search This optional attribute can be set to pass a list of folders to also find existing tables. It will not be used to create new files. f_dir_search => [ "/data/bar/csv", "/dump/blargh/data" ], A real-world example might explain this in more detail using DBD::CSV my $dbh = DBI->connect ("dbi:CSV:", undef, undef, { f_schema => undef, f_dir => "tmp", f_dir_search => [ "sandbox", "/tmp" ], f_ext => ".csv/r", f_lock => 2, f_encoding => "utf8", RaiseError => 1, PrintError => 1, FetchHashKeyName => "NAME_lc", }) or die "$DBI::errstr\n"; This will set the default folder for CSV files to be located in the folder "tmp". This folder will also be used for creating tables. When opening a handle to an already existing table, and that table's file(s) cannot be found in the folder indicated by "f_dir", the folders in the "f_dir"search" (if present) will be searched for the files needed to open the table. my $sth = $dbh->prepare ("select * from foo"); will, using the above example, search for tmp/foo.csv sandbox/foo.csv /tmp/foo.csv The DBI test suite tests this option in t/51dbm_file.t If people have feedback, it would be appreciated. Both possitive and negative. If no objections exist, I'd like to merge this branch into master and request a new release, so we can release DBD::CSV shortly after -- H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using perl5.00307 .. 5.19 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/