jkelly:

Ahh...this reminds me of an old PBP proverb:

Interactivity: Don't reinvent the standard test for interactivity.

Try a little something like this in your code:

use IO::Interactive qw( is_interactive );

if ( is_interactive() ) {
  print "Show a prompt?\n";
} 
else {
  print "Gobble STDIN.\n";
}
[download]

That's the gist of IO::Interactive . Hopefully you find it helpful/useful (I sure have in the past!)

By the way, if you peek inside of the code for IO::Interactive, you'll see there are few gotchas that the module addresses that you'd need to address (read: reinvent) to be thorough. I think one of them has to do with piping in a '/dev/null'.

Kurt

PS: I swear I'm not a Damian Conway fanboy!