do you have any documentation on this Solaris 'feature'?

Well, I know about it because of a Perl bug report from a few weeks ago. I'm not sure whether we got as far as resolving whether it's Perl's or Solaris's fault, and I haven't had time yet to go back and look at it further. Solaris is trying to backout of a stdio buffered read before exiting.

do you know offhand if calling POSIX::_exit() will honor DESTROY

_exit() does an immediate process exit without doing any cleanup of any kind, either at the Perl or C level.

Dave.