This is completely unrelated to your issue, but these suggestions may be useful in the future:

Use the strictures: 

use warnings;
use strict;

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Amongst other things, this will warn you that 
Scalar value @in_items[0] better written as $in_items[0]

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chomp can chomp all elements of a list at once, so there is no need to explicitly chomp each one: 

chomp (my @in_items = @_);

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It is a good practice to check the return value of open, opendir and system.

Avoid using $a and $b since they have special meaning for sort.

In reply to Re: Oh where has my memory gone? by toolic
in thread Oh where has my memory gone? by Anonymous Monk

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