Still true as of @8079. This is a bug report for perl from oloryn@mindspring.com, generated with the help of perlbug 1.26 running under perl 5.00553. jalex mentioned this on #perl. I'm not sure if he sent in a bug report or not. This program: #!/usr/bin/perl -w $x = "123 56"; $x =~ / /g; print "$x, ", pos($x), "\n"; { local $x } print "$x, ", pos($x), "\n"; produces the output 123 56, 4 123 56, Use of uninitialized value at test.plx line 5. The search position for a match appears to be reset when the target variable goes through a 'local' save and restore. I get the same results on 5.005_03 on linux. Ben