It could be a memory leak in your code, in Perl, or in MacOS X. Try to reduce the problematic code to the smallest portion that still shows the memory leak; that should point you a good bit of the way. If you still have problems, post the (now very short) program, and one of the Monks here should be able to help you.

For example...

does this leak memory if run within a directory with many large files? 
#!/usr/bin/perl

foreach my $f (<*>)
{
  open(F,"< $f");
  close($f);
}

[download]
What about this? 
#!/usr/bin/perl

foreach my $f (<*>)
{
  open(F,"< $f");
  <F>;
  close($f);
}

[download]

In reply to Re: cleaning up memory after closing files on MACOSX by sgifford
in thread cleaning up memory after closing files on MACOSX by codingchemist

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