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He usually started emacs directly. In this case he started emacs via a perl command, very very indirectly.

Also, a recent change was an admin setting TMPDIR, previously it had been left unset.

So it was a combination of two things that triggered it, and not one alone.

> So it was a combination of two things that triggered it, not one alone

And this basically sums up all the troubleshooting time sinks I've experienced in my career.

That is a good point. I still don't know the answer to that! I _think_ it's that the sysadmins added the new capability to Perl sometime in the last few weeks, and the the problem then didn't appear until after the next time I reloaded the system configuration.

I will confirm this with the sysadmins and add it to the article. Thanks!

I checked with Frew on this, and we still don't know the answer.

That seems to be a site-specific configuration.