in reply to Perl limits on number of open files?
I'd be pretty surprised if this were a Perl limit, unless it's one of those things you configure at compile time (when you compile perl I mean) or is a limitation of the compiler that compiled perl or the standard C library it was compiled with or somesuch like that.
More likely I suspect you're hitting an OS limitation. This does surprise me a little coming from OS X, but it's not unheard-of. Earlier versions of MacOS had a global system-wide limit, and it was preposterously low. I think 9.0 *raised* the limit to like 256 or maybe 512, and again that's global for all apps combined. If OS X limits *each process* to 250, that seems inane, but it's still an improvement.
My perl here can open a thousand files for output (5.8.1 on Mandrake 9.2), but it doesn't seem to be able to go much higher than that. "Inappropriate ioctl for device", $! tells me on about the 1022nd file. Again, this seems bad, but I doubt it's perl's fault.
;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print