Thank you for taking the time to look this over. The problem was in the script that I was using to invoke my program. When I called my program using the -C option to specify the configuration file, instead of reading it from STDIN, it worked as I expected. (reading the file was from a section of code I didn't include)

The version of Perl I am using is 5.8.4, which is the standard version for Solaris 10. Using 5.10 is not an option.

My coding style is not as tight a some people. I have a tendancy to be more verbose in my coding than others, but this is born out of a necessity to make the code understandable to people who will have to maintain it after me.

Yes, there some bugs in the section reading the configuration file which I had not yet fully corrected. My focus was on trying to figure out why the system call wasn't working as I expected it to work. Thanks for pointing those out.

Thanks again for your help and for your time.