Thanks for the reply.

I'll put the code through gdb. I've had limited experience with the perl source, as I did managed to get a Perl 4 version running on VMS many years ago.

I'd forgetton about 'out of memory' as a cause, I will definitely look into that. Its also really helpful to know that regexes can cause problems as well, although in this case I would think the segmentation violation would be 'repeatable'.

Unfortunately, the smaller/shorter versions of the code all work correctly. If I re-run the code when the underlying data is exactly identical the segmentation violation is repeatable, but any type of change to the code or the input causes it to significantly move to earlier or later parts of the code.

The code is portable, I've run it on ActiveState's 5.6.1 for NT, and it worked correctly. That's one of the reasons why I think its compiled code that sits inside of one of the modules, but that could also imply that the problem is with 5.6.0. I use a large number of Perl modules, Storable being one, and an older version (2.x) of Berkeley DB.I haven't had any problems with the shorter smaller versions, its only whe it all comes together and runs for a long period of time.

Thanks.