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

Answer 1

See the FAQ How do I flush/unbuffer an output filehandle? Why must I do this? and note:

Besides the $| special variable, you can use binmode to give your filehandle a :unix layer, which is unbuffered ...

For the general problem, you might want to look at Time::Progress:

%b

%B

progress bar which looks like:

##############......................