You have to realize that a value in perl takes quite an amount of bytes. For a string, it's something like 24 bytes, plus the size of the string itself. For a value to be an element of an array, there's another 4 bytes pointer overhead. Multiply that by 14M4, and you need over 400 Mb just to store empty strings.

So, you might have run out of memory. From the message you got, I'd say you ran out of memory for your stack (the value from the split are first put on the stack). I don't know whether perl has to copy all the values (and there goes another 400 Mb), but that's hardly relevant in this case.

You still shouldn't get this error, it should report running out of memory, but you've hit a limit imposed by the system, not Perl.

Please try what kind of error you get with 5.8.2. If you still get a panic, be so kind and submit a bug report.

Abigail