This is the Boulder IO package. Boulder provides a simple stream-oriented format for transmitting data objects between one or more processes. It does not provide for the serialization of Perl objects the way FreezeThaw or Data::Dumper do, but it does provide the advantage of being language independent. In addition to a stream-oriented interface, Boulder comes with a simple record-oriented database-oriented interface, Boulder::Store, which provides query and search capabilities comparable to many flat file DBMS systems. At the MIT Genome Center, Boulder is used for many interprocess communication tasks, as well as an abstract database interface for several large databases, including GenBank. To install, run the following commands: % perl Makefile.PL % make % make test (optional) % make install If any of the tests fail, run "make test TEST_VERBOSE=1" and note which subtests fail. Note that you will need the DB_File module installed in order to take advantage of the Boulder::Store database functions. Please see the documentation, Boulder.pod, and the various .pm files for more information. See the eg/ directory for some practical examples. Lincoln Stein lstein@cshl.org