I had hoped for a better answer to this question. I had been counting on perl's garbage collector to free memory. Now I see that I must be more conservitave with my memory use. A varible that dies with it's subrutine doesn't free that memory. I use little test varibles like $junk to test output before commiting changes. I can see now that the testing varible needs to be global. It really changes the way I'll be using memory in perl. fork()'ing might be a quicky solution, but we need to look for ways to trace memory use. Memory leaks in long running programs would cause major problems.