Okay, here's where the self-flagellation part of this whole monastery theme comes in.

bbfu, you gave me the piece I needed to see the light with:

A corollary to this is the fact that if you were to call new_tmpfile_name multiple times, END would still only be called once and only the first temp file unlinked. I suspect this is not what you mean to happen.

There's no contradiction between how I think END block queuing works once I realized that the program isn't working correctly. There are a lot of temp files not getting deleted. Why did I think it was working? All of my testing (using just a single temp file) worked great. Makes me think of this joke.

Not sure why I didn't trigger to the END-block-in-a-function weirdness when I originally wrote it. Hopefully it was just late!!

tilly thanks for the pointers about File::Temp and ReleaseAction. File::Temp I knew about and purposefully chose not to use. For this application I'm not in danger of a race condition nor do I need the portability or additional functionality. Because of the specific systems this is deployed on, getting the module deployed on all of them is a lot more of a hassle than it should be. ReleaseAction looks very cool and I'll be pulling it down and playing with it soon.

bbfu thanks for triggering the flash of insight. I thought about the eval approach but decided against it.

tye I implemented something almost identical to this shortly after I ran into the problem. merlyn's got an interesting take on it that I'll keep in mind, but I don't need the general case this time around.

buckaduck The conflict I thought I saw with the documentation was with a chart at the end of chapter 18 in the Camel v3. Even though I knew END blocks should all get queued at compile time, when I thought the code was working it looked like they were getting queued at both compile and run time.

Again, thanks for the help. I thought this might be another case of perl acting a little too smart. Kind of like when Dominus pointed out that these two lines do the same thing:

print "\L\uTeStInG\E.\n";
print "\u\LTeStInG\E.\n";
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