I tried just that prior to my post. It errored out on me.

Did you have IO::Handle loaded? Like I said earlier, IO::Handle needs to be loaded (even though $log isn't an IO::Handle).

It works at least since 5.6.1.

Not sure I understand your comment about $| being cryptic. Seems like Perl 101 to me...

STDOUT->autoflush(1); is more accessible than $| = 1.