dbm interoperability between Perl and Python?

[Roy Smith]

I've got a python program which reads dmb files produced by perl using
dbmopen().  On linux, it all works fine; the perl script produces .db
files which python's dbhash module opens and reads just fine.  The
problem is on Solaris.  On that platform, perl's dbmopen() produces
.dir/.pag file pairs, which python doesn't seem to know how to read;
whichdb() returns None (not '', which is what I expected).

How can I make python read those .dir/.pag dbm files?