OK, this was a helpful comment. Apparently, xspec is silently dying, but only sometimes. So, if I stepped through the debugger, or called xspec outside of my perl script, seemed to run fine, but this test with the sleep command shows me that it sometimes randomly dies (I can make the same call over and over again at the command line, and most of the time it works, but sometimes it fails). So, as suggested, my blaming of threaded perl was misplaced. Xpsec is a pretty standard and well-tested piece of astrophysical data analysis software, so figuring out why it's dying on my new system will be another (non-perl related) problem.

In reply to Re^2: Runing "regular" code with threaded perl by kingskot
in thread Runing "regular" code with threaded perl by kingskot

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