A purely theoretical follow up answer (because I know very little about perl internals):

I believe it's freed immediately. The issue you're probably recalling is that there's no orderly destruction of objects when a program is terminating. 

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

In reply to (MeowChow) Re3: Writing a REAL destructor by MeowChow
in thread Writing a REAL destructor by NaSe77

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