thanks for your informative reply, Jenda

Yes - I see why my $|++ shouldn't work after reading perlvar again (although adding it did get rid of duplicate entries). I couldn't, however, find any mention of the size of the input buffer used by <> or readline() - they both simply promise to return/read up to the next $/ (or EOF) when evaluated in scalar context. Can you point me to the apt document, please? I (wrongly) assumed that, as the seek pointer is shared that I'd get whole records, but you've disproved that :-)

I tried using an array containing all the input already but that has its own problems when you use fork() - perhaps it's time I tried to use threads; :-) Then I can share the array.

- Mark