Thanks for checking this out tall man.

I tried it with your test case and it fails too. (That is it fails when using $line but not $_). My test cases were about the same as yours...

Details on the linux system are...

Linux xxx.yyy.edu 2.4.18-19.8.0smp #1 SMP Thu Dec 12 04:36:25 EST 2002
+ i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[download]

And perl...

This is perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
[download]

So could this be a bug? in i386-linux-thread-multi?

Thanks!