The perl and the DBI I am using is an older version and he OS it runs on is a Dec Unix box. The sysadmin had been having trouble of late installing modules on the dec boxes. FYI The current version of perl I am using is

version 5.6.1 built for alpha-dec_osf 

DBI version:1.2.1
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Thanks for your response. For now I'll workaround with an additional sleep command. And yes this was a snippet of code that I quicky plucked out and forgot to include the localtime call before the second print.