I guess my point was that it seemed like you were trying to solve a problem related to a broken hardware environment by changing the way Perl does it's job. I don't envy you since it sounds like you can't install everything on a local disk, or use something like NFS mounts with cachefs.

FWIW, the number of stat64 calls would not decrease, but even NFS should (I think) cache the results of these calls rather than going over the network, but I digress...

bluto