Line 5 just made me spill my coffee (or I need to drink some more). Since STDOUT is the default filehandle, there is no need to muck around with that anachronism. A simple $| = 1 would suffice. This idiom was once useful for setting autoflush for a filehandle <i>other</i> than STDOUT, but this is not the case here. For a lengthier discussion on this, including the apologies of Randal Schwartz for coming up with it (when admittedly other facilities were not available for the very specific use case it addresses) see [0].<p>[0] <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/196754/what-does-selectselects-10-do-in-perl" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/196754/what-does-selectse...</a>