Thanks to everyone for the help so far.

I wasn't actually trying to make the problem go away by adding the call to log4perl. I was hoping to work out what was going on.

I'm using version 5.8.3 and don't think it is a problem with incorrect modules or the like. However, I don't know how I would look at %ENV and @INC immediately before the seg fault or bus error.

I suspect it is the recursion - the function being called uses LibXML version 1.58 to check some attributes of an XML tree. Although, even just putting a print in the loop over the children where the function calls itself also "removes" the problem, so this assumption may also be incorrect. As I now have another bug to correct, I shall return to the last working version, fix the second problem and try to implement and test the correction for the first problem more incrementally.

I would post some code but:

1. The program is written like C and peolple would laugh.
2. It is rather convoluted (see 1) and it would probably take more more time to produce a simple example than to solve the problem in the first place (although maybe that would be a good approach to solving the problem anyway).

Thanks again for the advice.

loris

Update

OK, now I know what is causing the problem. It is something to do with LibXML (V 1.58). If I do:

$parent->replaceChild($newNode,$oldNode);
[download]

I get a segmentation fault. If I do:

$parent->removeChild($oldNode);
$parent->addChild($newNode);
[download]

everything works OK. I would rather replace the node so that I don't have to worry keeping the ordering the same. Has anyone seen behaviour like that before? Thanks again for the help.

loris