Important also is "which perl interpretter" and "which OS" different implementations and operating systems will treat garbage collection differently. Just because the perl interpretter free()'d it doesn't mean that the operating system caught that yet... but of course, if perl was maintaining its own heap, that wouldn't matter, but the interpretter would keep the memory until terminated.

IE, I know that when I run perl, it will behave like this, but what about active perl... or the interpretter that comes with matlab.

Just Another Perl Backpacker