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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T03:31:12+00:00

I want to install latex2html and it complains that it can’t find dbmopen :

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I want to install latex2html and it complains that it can’t find dbmopen: 

$ ./configure 
loading cache ./config.cache
checking for perl... /usr/bin/perl
checking whether #! works in shell scripts... yes
launching proprietary configuration...

config.pl, Release 2006-1 (Revision )
Accompanies LaTeX2HTML, (C) 1999 GNU Public License.

checking for old config file (cfgcache.pm)... not found (ok)
checking for platform... linux (assuming unix)
checking for /usr/bin/perl... /usr/bin/perl
checking perl version... 5.010001
checking if perl supports some dbm... no
Error: Perl reported DBM error: dbmopen failed
LaTeX2HTML needs some DBM.

I am on ubuntu 11.4 and have no clue where to get dbmopen (or what this really is). What should I do to continue?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That is odd, dbmopen is core function in Perl 5. Try running this on the commandline:

    perl -le 'dbmopen my %h, "/tmp/foo", 0600 or die $!; $h{foo} = 5; print $h{foo}'

    If that prints 5 to the screen then you have dbmopen and it works (which I fully expect to be the case). I don’t know what latex2html is doing in its configure script, but if the code above works, it must be something wrong. It might be a permission error, dbmopen creates a file, so you may want to check where that file is being created and if you have permission to create a file there.

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