I encountered and interesting failure that only appears when I run prove with --merge on Windows. This is running in the Padre Stand Alone which means Strawberry October 2009. perl 5.10.1 Same thing on Linux works well though I have not compared the versions of Test::Harness.
C:\work\padre\Padre>prove -b t\15-locale.t t\15-locale.t .. 1/7 2 1 : 3 2 : 2 0 : E r r o r : C a n n o t s e t l o c a l e t o l a n g u a g e A r a b i c . t\15-locale.t .. ok All tests successful. Files=1, Tests=7, 3 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr + 0.04 sys = 0.06 CPU) Result: PASS C:\work\padre\Padre>prove --merge -b t\15-locale.t t\15-locale.t .. Failed 1/7 subtests Test Summary Report ------------------- t\15-locale.t (Wstat: 0 Tests: 6 Failed: 0) Parse errors: Tests out of sequence. Found (4) but expected (3) Tests out of sequence. Found (5) but expected (4) Tests out of sequence. Found (6) but expected (5) Tests out of sequence. Found (7) but expected (6) Bad plan. You planned 7 tests but ran 6. Files=1, Tests=6, 3 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr + 0.05 sys = 0.07 CPU) Result: FAIL The test file can be seen here: http://padre.perlide.org/trac/browser/trunk/Padre/t/15-locale.t?rev=9453 or to check it out here: svn co -r9453 http://svn.perlide.org/padre//trunk/Padre/t/15-locale.t In r9454 I committed a work-around capturing the stderr using Capture::Tiny at least for the case that fails. regards Gabor