17 Export a database into a portable format.

The gdbmexport utility converts the database into a portable flat format. Files in this format can be used to populate databases using the gdbm_import function (see section gdbm_import) or the i command of testgdbm utility (see testgdbm import). In many cases files in this format are suitable for sending over the network to populate the database on another machine. The only exception to this are databases whose records contain non-ASCII data (e.g. C structures, integers etc.). For such databases you will be better off by writing a specialized utility to convert them to an architecture-independent format.

If gdbmexport is linked with ‘libgdbm’ version 1.8.3, it can be used to convert databases from old to new format.

The utility takes two mandatory arguments: the name of the database file to convert and the output file name, e.g.:

$ gdbmexport junk.gdbm junk.flat

In addition two options are understood:

‘-h’: Display short usage summary and exit.
‘-v’: Display program version and licensing information, and exit.

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