dbm.gnu.open()

dbm.gnu.open(filename[, flag[, mode]])

Open a gdbm database and return a gdbm object. The filename argument is the name of the database file.

The optional flag argument can be:

The following additional characters may be appended to the flag to control how the database is opened:

Not all flags are valid for all versions of gdbm. The module constant open_flags is a string of supported flag characters. The exception error is raised if an invalid flag is specified.

The optional mode argument is the Unix mode of the file, used only when the database has to be created. It defaults to octal 0o666.

In addition to the dictionary-like methods, gdbm objects have the following methods:

gdbm.firstkey()

It’s possible to loop over every key in the database using this method and the nextkey() method. The traversal is ordered by gdbm‘s internal hash values, and won’t be sorted by the key values. This method returns the starting key.

gdbm.nextkey(key)

Returns the key that follows key in the traversal. The following code prints every key in the database db, without having to create a list in memory that contains them all:

k = db.firstkey()
while k != None:
    print(k)
    k = db.nextkey(k)

gdbm.reorganize()

If you have carried out a lot of deletions and would like to shrink the space used by the gdbm file, this routine will reorganize the database. gdbm objects will not shorten the length of a database file except by using this reorganization; otherwise, deleted file space will be kept and reused as new (key, value) pairs are added.

gdbm.sync()

When the database has been opened in fast mode, this method forces any unwritten data to be written to the disk.

gdbm.close()

Close the gdbm database.