I think I finally have a clean solution. After much reading and asking around in the office someone helped me with this snippet, assuming TAIL is the file handle you're doing the tail -f on. The answer is to simply redo the failed operation which previous responses had suggested. So if anyone is interested this is what I've settled on and particularly like it because it's short and straightforward:

while (1)
{
  while(1)
  {
    my $line = <TAIL>;
    if (!defined($line))
    {
      redo    if $! eq 'Interrupted system call';
      last;
    }

    print $line;
  }
  printf "Fell through...\n";
}
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-mark