gdbm

gdbm (also known as GNU dbm) is an open source, free and portable library software implemented in C and designed to provide developers with a set of database routines that are engineered to use extensible hashing.

How does it work?

GNU dbm works the same way as the standard UNIX dbm routines work. It provides a database indexing library replacement for the standard 'ndbm' and 'dbm' libraries found in major Linux operating systems.

gdbm is a very useful open source library for application developers and programmers who want to write C apps and require access to an efficient and simple database. It is designed for GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

Getting started with GNU dbm

To install the GNU dbm library in your computer, you will have to download the latest version from Softoware or the official website, save it on a location of your choice, extract it and fire up your favorite terminal emulator.

In the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted folder and run the “./configure && make” command (without quotes) to configure and compile the program. Then, run the “make install” command (without quotes) as root or with sudo to install it system wide.

Three executables will be available to you after installation, gdbm_dump, gdbm_load and gdbmtool, which can be access via a Linux terminal emulator. The software has been successfully tested with both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.

Under the hood and availability

A quick look under the hood of GNU dbm, will show us that the program is written entirely in the C programming language, which means that it is small and fast. It’s distributed as a universal sources archive that can be optimized for your operating system and hardware platform. Several distributions of Linux include gdbm in their default software repositories.