If Perl is using up all of my extended memory, is there any way of telling it not to be so greedy?

No and yes. Perl does use a lot of memory as it has made the design compromise to spend memory and gain speed. However Perl uses precicely as much memory as you ask it to. If you post your code it may well be simple to optimise it to use less memory.

Also by DOS you really mean DOS or do you mean the DOS window you can get from Windows? Do you really only have 40MB? How much memory does your DOS based program use running all by its lonesome? Perl will 'typically' use circa 2-5MB for fairly trivial stuff and ramps up from there. If your DOS process needs almost all the memory you have you may be flat out of luck.

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