(Bowing deeply, rhowerton humbly asks)
My understanding of autoflushing is that if you set $| = 1 then it is supposed to flush after a write (http://www.perlmonks.com/index.pl?node_id=20590), however it does not seem to be working. I am assuming that the print statement is a write and that it should print to the screen immediately upon execution. Here is the script I am trying to get working...understand it has changed many times as frustration has set in.

$|++;

open(TCPDUMP,"/usr/sbin/tcpdump -i eth0:1 port 80 -s 60 -xX | grep GET
+ |") or die "Could not run command: $!";

my $DEBUG = 1;
my $sleepTime = 5;
my $count = 0;
my $sleepCheck = 0;

while(<TCPDUMP>)
{
        chomp($_);
        print "$_\n";
        FORK:
        {
                if($sleepCheck == 0)
                {
                        if (my $pid = fork)
                        {
                                # parent here
                                # child process pid is available in $p
+id
                                $count++;
                        }
                        elsif (defined $pid)
                        {       # $pid is zero here if defined
                                # child here
                                # parent process pid is available with
+ getppid
                                $sleepCheck = 1;
                                sleep($sleepTime);
                                open(DUMPLOG, "> ./dump.log") or die "
+Could not open dump log: $!";
                                print DUMPLOG "$count\n";
                                print "$count\n";
                                close(DUMPLOG);
                                $sleepCheck = 0;
                                $| = 0;
                                exit(0);
                        }
                        elsif ($! == EAGAIN)
                        {
                                # EAGAIN is the supposedly recoverable
+ fork error
                                if($DEBUG == 1)
                                {
                                        print "Error: $!.\n";
                                }
                                sleep 5;
                                redo FORK;
                        }
                        else
                        {
                                # weird fork error
                                die "Can't fork: $!\n";
                        }
                }
                else
                {
                        $count++;
                }
        }
}
[download]

Thank you in advance,
Ryan