Suppose I write a module which provides a "frobnicate" function:

sub frobnicate {
    my ($string) = @_;
    $string =~ s/foo/bar/g;
    return $string;
}

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Suppose I write a program that runs for a really long time, and uses "frobnicate" only once during its initialization, and it passes a really long string to it.

Should I expect that $string will hold this long string for the program's lifetime? Am I supposed to undef every single variable to avoid this? (Which would pretty much nullify this "optimization", but it seems to be the only way to avoid the memory leak.)

Update: Replaced the code of the example function.

In reply to Re^5: out of memory problem by betterworld
in thread out of memory problem by lightoverhead

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