in reply to Unable to get terminal size

Another tactic is to tell the terminal handling code that you have some sort of hard copy terminal, so it won't try to impose a "screen geometry" on devices that simply don't have one, such as a pty or a pipe. For instance,
TERM=la120 perl -e '`perl -d -le "print 1"`'
or
perl -e '`TERM=la120 perl -d -le "print 1"`'