Normally, html ignores CR/LF. So, the browser cannot display the line until it gets something (like: BR or P) that tells it that this 'line' is complete and can be formatted.

Right, but I made a point of setting the content type to be text/plain (that is, specifically not to be HTML), and that worked correctly using the shell script, but not using the Perl script. That's why I'm confused.

Are you sure?

from your code: print $cgi->header('text/html');

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

The first Perl script in my original post had 'text/plain'; that's the one that I'm talking about.

And as blahblah correctly points out lower down, this appears to have something to do with CGI, because if I remove that dependency as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$|=1;

{
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

    print "Autoflush is currently " . ($|?"on":"off") . ".\n";
    for ( 1..5 ) {

      print "Value is $_.\n";

      sleep 1;
    }
    print "Autoflush is currently " . ($|?"on":"off") . ".\n";
}
[download]

The script works properly. So CGI is ignoring $| and doing its own caching. Now I know.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds