I have an object that locks a resource and releases it on destruction. This is under mod_perl, and the object should be destroyed at the end of every request.

Unfortunately, a reference to the object is being maintained somewhere, I'm not sure where, which is preventing destruction and keeping the resource locked.

I need to locate those extra references, but as a short-term solution, I'd like to make sure the lock is released.

I could call the DESTROY method explicity, which would release the lock. But then, I want to make certain that DESTROY is not called again, implicitly, if/when the object is really reclaimed, since the lock will have already been released, making it unsafe.

If I reblessed the object into a null class, it seems like I'd be okay. Here's some example code. Does that make sense? Is there a better solution?

Thank you. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

package Null;
use strict;

our $AUTOLOAD;

sub AUTOLOAD { warn __PACKAGE__ . " $AUTOLOAD CALLED" }

package Foo;
use strict;

sub new { bless [], __PACKAGE__ }

sub DESTROY {
  my $self = shift;

  warn __PACKAGE__ . " DESTROY CALLED";
}

package main;

my $s1 = Foo->new;
my $s2 = $s1;
$s1->DESTROY; bless $s1, 'Null';

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In reply to explicitly calling destructor by mla

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