PG, I thought I was clear to give in-line COMMENTED EXAMPLE, to SHOW that it is the CONCURRENCY that is broken. I guess writing a comment on the commented line of the join "this works but who cares :)" was confusing to some. Sorry. But do you have a real answer too? Do you need more info? Did you try it on some 5.8.2 to check? Maybe on Windows? Maybe the newbies that you try to teach want to know why one program works just fine on 5.8.0 but blows Perl.exe on 5.8.2?