Well long live the error message! It definitely is pointing to my open2 call.

open2: fork failed: Resource temporarily unavailable at /home/sbank/gz
+ip.pl line 74
[download]

Here's more meat from my script. (You can call it a sloppy joe, because of my poor coding.)

{
   open(OUTPUT, "$outfile$$") or die "can't open file $outfile$$: $!";
   
   open2(\*GZIP_IN, \*GZIP_OUT, "$gzip -dc -q $outfile$$") or die "can
+not open2 $gzip: $!";
   
   until ( eof(OUTPUT) ) { # read in chunks of 1024.
      read(OUTPUT, $buffer, 1024);
      print GZIP_OUT $buffer;
   }
   close GZIP_OUT;
   select STDOUT; $| = 1; # make unbuffered
   while (<GZIP_IN>) {
      # some other stuff
      print STDOUT "$_"; 
   }
   close GZIP_IN;
   close INPUT;
   
   unlink "$outfile";
   unlink "$outfile$$";
}
[download]

Line 74 is the open2 line.