1. perl fills the buffer
2. perl sleeps for two seconds
3. perl appends to the buffer, and then flushes it because the end of the script is reached.

print "First<br>\n";
sleep 2
print "Second\n";
###
$| = 1;
print "First<br>";
sleep 2;
print "Second";
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2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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Hi juerd,

Your solution doesn't seem to produce the desired result. There four statements are printed at the same time after the long pause, not one after another after each pause.

kiat

You are suffering from buffering.
Either add linebreaks or set $| to 1 ($| = 1;)

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
[download]

There were some tricks. The main one was I had to do use CGI qw(-oldstyle_urls) to make it work with Netscape 4.x. Basically, here is the way to do it:

use CGI qw(-oldstyle_urls);
my $q = new CGI;
# ...
if ($q->param('last')) {
        last_page($q);
} else {
        next_page($q);
}

sub next_page {
        # ...
        $url = $q->url('-query' => 1);
        $last = ($url =~ /\?/) ? '&last=1' : '?last=1';

        # Here is the delay, 10 seconds
        print $q->header('-Refresh' => "10;URL=$url$last"),
        # print the rest of the 1st page here...
}

sub last_page {
        # ...
        print $q->header(),
        # etc...
}
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