Thank you both!

Dave, you're absolutely right, cat | grep does the same thing...

...and thanks for the link Browser, it makes more sense now. I had been purging after each run. It's a little irritating, because others will likely need to use these programs in future, and some of them may use OSX.

It would be ideal if it were possible to "switch off" this behaviour from start of the script.

For now, purging at the end will have to do:

 system("purge") if $^O eq "darwin";

Thanks guys!

In reply to Re: Inactive memory and OSX by mtmcc
in thread Inactive memory and OSX by mtmcc

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