Absolutely, but I can't do that here. The main issue here was that I needed to check for newly appended records very often and this can only be done by closing/opening the table with new to re-read the dbase header and access the new records. I was able to slightly modify the XBase.pm module to allow safely calling the read_header function on an open table whenever I like. Now I can just open the needed tables once at the begining of the program, store the table objects in a hash, and just call read_header to check for new records instead of closing/opening. This has solved my memory issues.