Hi all,
This reply is to the previous three posts, as some possibilities are raised more than once. Thanks for all the help...

Temp space - checked that, and there's plenty of room. Helpfully enough, we did have some trouble with space limitations on /var/tmp on this server previously, and the error messages were fairly explicit.

Output space - same thing, there's plenty of room in the output directory.

Path to "sort" - a good point; I hadn't tried using the full path to the binary. But the script works perfectly until I increase the number of data files I'm processing past a certain point (3 of them). So I doubt the path is a problem.

Unnecessary "cat" - oops. Quite right. I honestly don't know why I put that in there! I'll try it without "cat" - could that extra process be using up all our allocated memory? Again, I still don't understand why I wouldn't get some kind of error, if that were the case.

Here's another interesting wrinkle. Before and after the "sort" system call, I just tried putting some other system calls to see if they worked. So now it looks like this: 
system("echo 'now executing sort...' ");
system(" cat $file | sort -t\\| +1 -2 > $file.out");
system("ls -la");

[download]
If I process 2 data files, all 3 system calls execute. If I process 3 data files, the first 2 system calls execute, but the third one doesn't. If I process 4 data files, none of them execute. Spooky! So, okay, if I'm running out of memory, why do the system calls die so silently? I guess I'm probably trying to determine if this is a Perl thing, or a Solaris thing. I'm baffled, though, because I've always found Perl to have exceptionally useful errors. I'll toss it by the Unix admins just to see what happens....
Thanks!

In reply to Re: Re: vanishing system call by Anonymous Monk
in thread vanishing system call by Anonymous Monk

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