Flushing Perl STDIN buffer

Question

Is there any way to clear the STDIN buffer in Perl? A part of my program has lengthy output (enough time for someone to enter a few characters) and after that output I ask f

Answer 1

{ local $/;  }

This temporarily - limited to scope of the block - sets $/, the input record seperator, to be undef, which tells perl to just read everything instead of reading a line at a time. Then reads everything available on STDIN and doesn't do anything with it, thus flushing the buffer.

After that, you can read STDIN as normal.