Well... if I run the exact same code over and over again in a loop, I might expect it to grow the first few times as various things are allocated, but if it consistently continues to grow after executing the same code after dozens and hundreds of loops, I consider that a leak. I don't care if perl is holding a pointer to it somewhere in its bowels - if it keeps allocating more memory in each loop, it's a leak in my book...

As I said, I'm pretty sure that it's $_ that's growing. I don't see anything that's obviously requiring more and more space in $_. So isn't that a leak?

I really wish I could boil it down to a simple test case, but I'm still puzzled as to exactly what aspect of the code is causing the leak...