Sometime between Perl 5.8.6 and 5.12.1 a memory leak was introduced into Perl and it appears to be in the glob function. The following should reproduce the problem on any VMS system:
@dirs = glob('SYS$COMMON:[000000]*.DIR'); for (;;) { foreach (@dirs) { s|\[000000\]|\[|; $_ = substr($_, 0, rindex(uc($_), '.DIR')) . ']'; @files = glob($_ . '*.*;*'); } } Execute this and then repeatedly hit control-T to watch your memory consumption climbing. Let it run long enough and it will eventually abort due to insufficient virtual memory. Mark Berryman