in reply to Picking up where you left off..
Second idea was to use some kind of pipe arrangement , where access.log is a special file with a script connected to the other end.
This is a named pipe (FIFO), and might work. It's just a special file that one or more processes can write to, and another process can read from. If you are on a Unix system, check out the manpage for mkfifo for more info, or ask Google.
I would also check out the File::Tail module. It's documentation does a better job of explaining how it works than I can.
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