Basically what I have is a UFO report. I do have a picture of the UFO. But in order to convince anybody that this UFO actually exists, I need to be able to make the UFO appear on demand!

I suspect that there is something that varies between runs of Perl. What that is, I don't know. The program is a command line thing using STDIN and STDOUT. So my thinking now is to make a Perl program that itself launches another instance of Perl with my script, "perl wm.pl" (I call my program "word master"). This new test program would take over STDIN and STDOUT and run some test scenario, quit the program and then repeat this process a whole bunch of times looking for the UFO. I believe that I have saved a complete command line session from Perl launch to UFO appearance. I suppose there could be some state dependent thing so I would run all of the commands leading up to the failure.

As I said in the title of my post, the "problem" only happens some of the time! This is not a "hard fail" and as such, I expect there to be some difficulty in making this repeatable. Anyway suggestions about how best to write such a "beat it up" test script would be welcome!

This thing actually works well enough for my purposes "as is". But it has gotten my Perl inquisitiveness tweaked.