No, $| controls auto-flushing of output which is often confused with buffering (which can be "none", "line", or "block" in Unix) but doesn't have much to do with input.

To see characters from a Unix TTY before a newline, you need to get into "raw" or "semi cooked" mode instead of the usually "cooked" mode. "raw" means no processing is done and "semi cooked" means much (but not all of the usual) processing is done but you get characters as they are typed (though I still think there is a timer involved here so you usually don't even get them immediately, just almost immediately -- it has been too long since I had the misfortune to care about this stuff).

I have yet to find a good way to read one character at a time in Win32, much less a module that portably handles this.