First, let me appologize for not having done this, one of the Golden Rules of posting for help. I cut down the script to very small pieces, only to find that I had no problems running the script, all the way up to its full size, from the command line.

The problem appears to be a conflict between resources used by the GnuPG module and some software used by our internal admins called Autosys. This conflict is causing the automatic restart of the Perl script by itself!

Further, I've been informed that other bugs in Autosys have resulted in an investigation into replacing this scheduling software. Cron isn't used here because of security concerns, and other reasons unimportant to the moment.

Thanks, derby, for your reminding me of the "small script" testing requirement to narrow the problem.

I welcome email should anyone else have a problem of this nature.