Okay, so the number of runs of a Perl program in which this feature comes into play approximates to:

Count *every* run, of *any* perl program, *anywhere*.

Divide by that number where $^M was set.

Divide by that number that a death handler was entered at some point.

Divide by that number that ran out of memory at that *at that point*.

Divide by that number that are running on an appropriate OS.

Divide by that number that constitute an application the might benefit.

If 10% had $^M set, and 10% of those enter a death handler at some point, and 10% of those coincidentally run out of memory, and 10% of those are running on an appropriate OS and 10% of those could benefit from their death handlers not running out of memory before dying,

I make that 0.001% of perl scripts that might benefit, which makes my million to 1 shot guess look prescient.

If, like me, you consider that 10% is at least an order of magnitude too high for at least 2 of those, and 2 orders of magnitude to high for a third, then you the figure is more like 0.0000001%, which makes the million to one shot look positively optimistic.

Anyone want to buy some alien abduction insurance? :)

How many scripts use the dbmopen function? You can point to at least half the features in Perl and realize that less than 1% of all scripts in existence directly use that code. In many cases, probably much less than that.

Granted, $^M is a very obscure and esoteric feature, but so is dbmopen ...

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This is all getting way academic now, but if your estimate of those that use dbmopen is anything like correct, that's 1 in 100.

Whereas if my guesses for $^M are anything like correct, we are talking 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 100,000,000.

Even if every programmer added a $^M reserve to every script they ever wrote, your still only looking at 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 10,000,000.

Another difference is that dbmopen has been superceded. Before tie and all modules that use it became available, I think dbmopen was probably a lot more used. If you count the number of programs that use some form of tie, or tie-based module, your 1% is probably an under-estimate. Tie::File alone could probably manage 1%.

Nothing has superceded $^M.

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