You're quite right. And even though I understood what was going wrong, my interpretation of localization was backwards in this case. I was thinking that I was trying to make $.'s behavior local to the <DATA>-block, when I should have been attempting to localize seek()'s effects on $. to seeky().

(It didn't help matters that my original problem was significantly more complicated. I tried to fix it by localizing $. wherever I had a "local $_;" in a module, but forgot to search for seek()s.)

FWIW, I would add the "local $.;" statement to seeky itself, analagous to adding "local $_;" in subroutines.

Thanks for the response, Animator.