How can I print text immediately without waiting for a newline in Perl?

Question

I have a computationally expensive task in perl, and would like to inform the user that computation is ongoing by printing out a period after each portion of the computation is completed. Unfortunately, until I print a "\n", none of my periods are printed. How can I address this?

Answer 1

You need to set autoflush for STDOUT. Example:

use IO::Handle;
STDOUT->autoflush(1);
foreach (1..20) {
  print '.';
  sleep(1);
}