Sorry about the hiatus. I tried your code and it works just fine. Perhaps you should look and see if something unusual has happened to your operating system - perhaps part of perl has just gone bad.

>x7  <
SV = PV(0x743c) at 0x7108
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pPOK)
  PV = 0x8500 "x\0227  "\0
  CUR = 5
  LEN = 80
hi
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