Hi Perl Monks, Im working with perl 5.8.8. and when I do this 
 my $thr = threads->create(\&function);
 $thr->join;

sub function {
}

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I get a error " Attempt to free unreferenced variable SV: " while 'joining' the thread I came to know that perl 5.10.0 solves this. But for some reasons I cant port it to newer version as all the softwares are built on 5.8.8. What I essentially need is the main thread has to wait for the child thread to finish. But I couldnt do with join as my interpreter encounters problem. So I tried to use the following code snippet which uses semaphores. 
use threads;
use threads::shared;
use Thread::Semaphore;

my $init = 0;
my $sem:shared;
$sem = new Thread::Semaphore($init);

my $thr = threads->new(\& process );

$sem->down;

sub process {

    lock($sem);
    $sem->up ;
    return;
    
}

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Here also once semaphore count is incremented by the thread the main thread immediately finishes its execution and I am getting "A thread finished while 2 threads were running" Thats because the exexution may shift to main thread before the return is called. Can someone help me out. I found out it is actually a bug with internal reference count. Refer this bug

In reply to Problem with threads + join by sumanth

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