I'm running the test with 5.8.1 on darwin (macosx 10.3.5), and it can chug away happily (or maybe with intense boredom) for as long as I let it run. I added "$|=1" and a counter that prints out at every 1K iterations -- I decided to stop watching after 64K cycles through the while loop... (should I have waited longer?)

(update: tried it with 5.8.5 on a freebsd5.3-BETA/intel -- again, no seg fault after 64K iterations, but it ran noticeably faster than 5.8.1 on the mac.)