incidentally, we also use the singleton pattern for our Log class - and use this instead of print - it adds PID, date, time etc to all the lines, manages the logging detail level - (error, warn, general, debug, dump)

And the Log has a DESTROY that gets called when the singleton instance is destroyed - ie at the end of program, were we do some tidy-up, including emailing our support group if any ERROR or WARNING messages were logged.

It also provides a logFatal() method, which logs a message, sends an email and does a POSIX::_exit($exitval)

HIH

The reason we use POSIX::_exit() is that we are running on *NIX with the buggy GCC 2.95 - a task that runs for 5 minutes, creating hashes of about 200MB takes 20-30 minutes for garbage collection - the POSIX::_exit() exits immediately.