Ahhh, some pleasant morning Pythoneering, all done. I wrote two classes for my Python shell tinkering, and used the marshal and anydbm modules.
Of course, I was tasked with that task because, last night in my sleepless stupor, I wrote open(file, "w") instead of anydbm.open(file, "w") in the Python shell. The former, unlike the latter, does destructive writes--so bye-bye file, which is bad if it's a dbhash database several people have been pouring stuff into for something like a week now.
But the software (Roundup) also keeps a history of its changes in a different file, so all I had to do was figure how to repopulate the database with the stuff from the history file. (I reentered a few by hand, from Roundup's email output, but that was too slow.) So all is better.
