in reply to Reading from an appended file

This is another faq in just a few minutes. Well, sort of: in any case you may be interested in checking what perldoc -q tail has to tell you. To quote from it:
First try seek(GWFILE, 0, 1); The statement "seek(GWFILE, 0, 1)" doesn't change the current position +, but it does clear the end-of-file condition on the handle, so that the next <GWFILE> makes Perl try again to read something.