Thanks. I was referring to calling die() in a SIG{INT}...
I tried it in 5.6, and as expected, sometimes it
works as advertised, sometimes it causes a core dump, and
sometimes it just "goes away". I guess it's really time to
go to 5.8.
Calling die() inside a $SIG{INT} handler is definitely asking for trouble. Perl can and will segfault, as you've found. die allocates memory, which is a no-no inside an interrupt handler, hence the problem. 5.8 takes care of this, though there are downsides to that related to alarm and blocking system calls.