I guess it's because you're piping stuff to STDIN. That will finish with an EOF (so that your while loop can complete) and so when you get to trying to read from STDIN again for user input, perl thinks STDIN is at EOF and doesn't read any more.

Try putting this in before your <STDIN>:

eof(STDIN) and print "This ain't gonna work\n";
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Question is... how do you reset the EOF on STDIN?