tye, you are a smart, smart person. That worked. Here's what I ended up with:

use strict;
use warnings;
require IO::Handle;       # <--- new

open LOG,">foo.log" or die "can't open foo.log: $!";
<b>LOG->autoflush(1);</b> # <--- new
while(1) {
  print LOG (localtime).": something\n";
  sleep(5);
}
[download]

Thanks a lot for your help, tye. -zeno