I don't use *nix, so this is something I've read about rather than done for myself, but...

there is mention (in perlfunc open, maybe more in perlopentut?) of a more-than-3-argument form of the piped open. open FILEHANDLE,MODE,EXPR,LIST

The idea is that you bypass the shell and run the command (tail in this case) directly, and so get the handle of the tail process returned rather than that of the shell. It would look something like:

my $tail_id = open my $tail_fh, '-|', 'tail', '-1lf', 'info_file' or d
+ie ...;
END{ 
    kill 3, $tail_id;
}
[download]

The caveat is that the shell is what performs the redirection of stderr in your example, so you cannot do that with this form of open.

If that is a requirement then you are into using IPC::Open3 with all the complexities that entails.