I have opened a large (72 mb) file that i am parsing and loading into a hash. I then sort the hash and write it to a new text file. In the process I am receiving the following system error:

Out of memory during request for 1016 bytes, total sbrk() is 670351204 bytes!

Is this a memory leak? I have run this process over and over successfully but now all I receive is this error. Here is the code: 

while (<DATAFILE1>) {

        chomp;
        ($account,$time,$dept,$dimset,$sched,$emp,$type,$val) = split(
+/[{]/);

        $emp = empnumber ($emp);

        push(@{$employee{$dept.$account.$emp.$subctr}},($account,$time
+,$dept,$dimset,$sched,$emp,$type,$val));
        $subctr++;

}
close(DATAFILE1);


foreach $empnum (sort keys(%employee)) {

       my ($account,$time,$dept,$dimset,$sched,$emp,$type,$val)= @{$em
+ployee{$empnum}};
       string2 = $account."{".$time."{".$dept."{".$dimset."{"."SchHead
+Cnt"."{".$emp."{".$type."{".$val;
       write(OUTPUT2);

}
close(OUTPUT2);

sub empnumber {
       my ($number) = @_;
       my $newnumber;

       if ($number < 10) {$newnumber = E00.$number}
       elsif ($number < 100) {$newnumber = E0.$number}
       else {$newnumber = E.$number}

       return $newnumber;
}

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In reply to Out of memory Error by treebeard

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