in reply to ALTernative solutions?
Can you use system()? If you can call out to the shell, you should be able to work something up with stty and/or setmetamode.
I'm currently on OSX, and these don't function on my ssh terminal, so I can't work out an example for you, but googling on those two programs should get you started.
for(split(" ","tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH")){print reverse . " "}print "\b.\n";
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