Interestingly, this causes both my 5.6 Win32 ActiveState Perl and my 5.6.1 Linux to segfault, but appears to work under 5.00503. Hmmm....

update: I think this is a garbage-collection issue, stemming from your deletion of a hash key will simultaneously dereferencing it. Ingenious, and dangerous.

update2: Err, that wasn't the problem, the problem was that my test hash was already %t, so it was getting reset inside the sub, and I ran into this.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print