Well it seems there are bugs with the UnxUtils version of tail as well. When using it in a perl script with any form of the "follow" options (e.g., "tail -f", "tail --follow", etc.) it never gives anything and the tail.exe process needs to be maually killed. "tail -f" works OK on the commandline except when its output is piped to another process (even "cat".) When run without the '-f' however, it works as one would expect.
Still looking for a better solution and will update this thread once I find one. 
$fh->open("tail.exe --follow=name tls.log|") || die $!;
print("opened: '$fh'\n");
while(my $c = $fh->getc) {  # hangs here. tried getline also
    print("$c");
}
print("closing: '$fh'\n");
close($fh);

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In reply to Re^2: Tail'ing a log that frequently rolls over by frd1963
in thread Tail'ing a log that frequently rolls over by frd1963

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