BTW another solution that comes to mind is to use a flyweight pattern for your objects. That puts all of your current objects into a convenient hash that you can iterate through in an END block to do cleanup. Doing things that way gives you 2 wins. Better encapsulation, and it solves the global destruction problem in a way that is more likely to work across versions of Perl.

Just to be clear: lexical variables don't suffer from this problem, even lexical variables at file scope. That implies that lexicals are destroyed before global destruction begins (which I believe to be true but I haven't verified that beyond testing that lexicals don't suffer from this problem).

To be extra clear: destroying a lexical variable won't necessarilly destroy the object that it references. If you have other references to that same object and any of those reference manage to survive until global destruction, then your object will survive until then as well (and can so could then suffer from misordered destructions).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

Not true. On 5.005_03 try this:

my $foo = be({name => "foo"});
my $bar = be({name => "bar", data => $foo});
my $baz = be({name => "baz", data => $bar});

sub gotcha {
  $bar->{"bar can't go"} = "until this function is cleaned up";
}

sub be {
  return bless shift;
}

sub DESTROY {
  my $self = shift;
  print "$self->{name} died\n";
}

__END__

on 5.005_03 for me prints:

baz died
foo died
bar died
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Note that $foo is going away before $bar. Remove the function holding $bar to global destruction and everything will clean up properly. Make them all global and you will again run into trouble.

my %member;
tie(%member, "GMS::MemberFile", UID=>3);
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