I don't have access to a Solaris box right now. But of course one approach would be to disable process core dumps and then Perl or anything else won't generate one. Solaris Core Dumps

I would suggest simplifying to the basics. I didn't see your statement that installed the handler. Try running this and see what happens.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

$SIG{INT} = \&handler;

while (1)
{
   sleep(1);
}

sub handler
{
   print "ctl-c entered\n";
   exit(0);
}
[download]

I am on Windows now and there is some strangeness in how CTL-C is implemented (with a INT handler installed, it will not interrupt the sleep() function, e.g. with sleep(5), it might take 5 seconds for the CTL-C handler to be executed!).

Try the above and see what happens. If you still get a core dump, take out the print statement and try again with just the "exit(0)" statement. Sometimes (sys dependent), you may not be able to do anything useful after a CTRL-C except exit. I suppose that it is possible that your debug logging statement itself may be causing the core dump depending upon what is going on when you hit CTL-C.