Now that I have a slightly clearer understanding of how perl threads work, I have a piece of code that resolves this problem. Note that tying and untying with locks solves the problem. Apparently a tie will not carry well when spawning threads so each one would have to do its own tying and untying. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared;
use Thread::Queue;
use DB_File::Lock;
use Fcntl;

my $q = Thread::Queue->new();
my %items; 
my $DB = tie %items,'DB_File::Lock','itemdb',O_CREAT|O_RDWR,0640,$DB_H
+ASH,'write' or die "Could not open SDBM file: $!\n";
$items{$_} = 1 for 1..10;
untie %items;
undef $DB;

for (1..3) { threads->new(\&ttest) }
my @threadlist = threads->list;
$q->enqueue($_) for 1..10;
$q->enqueue(undef) for @threadlist;
$_->join for @threadlist;

unlink 'itemdb.pag','itemdb.dir';

sub ttest {
        my %db; 
        while (my $qthingie = $q->dequeue) {
                my %items;
                my $DB = tie %items,'DB_File::Lock','itemdb',O_CREAT|O
+_RDWR,0640,$DB_HASH,'write' or die "Could not open SDBM file: $!\n";
                print "$qthingie $items{$qthingie}\n";
                untie %items;
        }
}

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In reply to Re: threads, tie and segmentation fault by petesmiley
in thread threads, tie and segmentation fault by petesmiley

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