Hi arhuman, this code ended up working, too. Now I have a couple of alternatives!:

use strict;
use warnings;

open LOG,">foo.log" or die "can't open foo.log: $!";

my $selected = select(LOG);
$|++;
select($selected);
while(1) {
  print LOG (localtime).": something\n";
  sleep(5);
}
[download]

Thanks a lot, arhuman. -zeno