Thanks for the info and link, BrowserUK. I believe I missed that late post to that thread. It sounds like one shouldn't (yet) rely fully on Perl freeing your unused blocks, which is why questions about freeing memory are generally answered along the lines of "don't worry about it, just write efficient algorithms, the GC will do what it can, etc.." Anyway, I probably shouldn't have said Perl never reclaims used memory, since it's quite clear Elian knows better what he's talking about than I!

FYI, Perl frees the blocks in your sample code on my Linux system.

blokhead