Ah! i can't believe I missed the answer and it was IN the documentation! I'm so ashamed...What can i say, it was a very long workday. ::shrugs apologetically::

UPDATE: ok, this is kind of wierd, it seems that everything is blocked from printing in the main loop until I ctrl+c, after which it all prints out and dumps back to command line.

while($EXIT == 0)
{
  $temp = pollForData();
  print $temp;
  print LOG $temp;
  sleep(1);
}
[download]

however, if i print the returned data and include something else within the same print command, it works fine.

while($EXIT == 0)
{
  $temp = pollForData();
  print "$temp\n";
  print LOG $temp;
  sleep(1);
}
[download]

the thing is, i don't want to print the data every iteration through the loop, but otherwise NOTHING at all happens until i ctrl+c...OH, almost forgot. the pollForData sub:

sub pollForData
{
  my($length,$buffer);

  # Poll controller to send any pending data (if there is none, 
  # it will send back a 'RES' control character
  print SERIAL $IM{'POL'};
  $upstream++;
  # read in $BUFFER amount of bytes
  $length = read(SERIAL,$buffer,$BUFFER);
  # update num of bytes received so far
  $downstream += $length;
  # return data
  return $buffer;
}
[download]