Thank you very much BikeNomad. I ran your script, and I got the same error message as before, saying that the autogeneration of the config failed.

It is reasonably apparent that I am dealing with either a 5.005 problem or a circa 1997 NCR MP-RAS Unix problem.

I am not even certain that XS or Swig would work, assuming that I had the time and skills to coerce them to do so.

Therefore: PLAN B. Instead of calling C from Perl, I will have Perl write its input to a special file. A C program called with backticks will read the input and print the output.

Not the most elegant way to do things, but the best option now that the Inline.pm/MP-RAS/5.005 combination has proven to be a big problem.