Hi all,
This is the Anonymous Monk (I guess I should give myself a login) who originally posted this question. Thanks to everyone for all the very helpful suggestions. It's very gratifying to know there are so many helpful Perl folks out there (not that much of a surprise, though).

I wanted to let you know I am not ignoring your suggestions. I am going to try them out, one by one, today, and will post results when I can get to the bottom of this question. But this will probably take all day as I can only work on this in my "spare time". In the meantime, here are some quick replies to a few of the posts.

virtualsue - I tried your $exitval, $signum, and $coredumped suggestions - unfortunately (or maybe not) they all returned zero. ??? I'll have another shot at this... I tried it on Saturday and wasn't paying that much attention.

sauoq - Thanks for clarifying the difference between $! and $?. I tried both - $? returned a zero, which explains why $! gave me the seemingly erroneous error "not enough space" (perhaps).

graff - Yes, I've confirmed that the "final output file" (the one I'm trying to sort) does exist, and in fact it sorts just fine when I do it either on the command line or within a separate Perl script, using the exact same system(" ") command. That's why I'm thinking it may be some memory issue. (Oh, I guess that reply also covers LanceDeeply.)

helgi - It's funny you should suggest I use Perl's "sort" for this, because that's what I originally wanted to do, but after reading about it in the Camel book I was afraid it might hog too much memory, if I could get it to work at all. I've never tried Perl's "sort" before, but the impression I get from the book is that it's intended to be used for arrays, not big old text files. If you have a suggestion as to how to use it, I'd be grateful.

jarich - Thanks for the ulimit command. It looks like I've got a limit of 2gb for the "data seg" ... I'll double check this with the Unix admins.

Okay, I'll get to work on the debugging tips and will post the results, for the curious, later today. Thanks again, to everybody, for all the help.

In reply to much appreciated by Anonymous Monk
in thread vanishing system call by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.