I recently upgraded a 32-bit Debian server to 64-bit by re-installing, and copying my data into place.

After this I have a perl script that repeats the following, and is segfaulting on the tell line:

seek(FIN,$ps,0);
tell(FIN, $ps);
$line=<FIN>;

I don't speak perl, so I'm not sure exactly what is going on here. I can get the script to run (apparently successfully) by commenting every occurrence of tell, but this is obviously not the best solution.

I suspect that tell is calling a 32-bit binary or something, and that is the cause of the segfault - but I don't know.

Can someone explain what tell does, and if it is indeed a separate binary, what package it belongs to (or how it is installed ie. cpan)?

Or perhaps I am on the wrong track?