I've done that exact thing single-threaded with File::Tail and, I'm pretty certain it was, IO::Select. More robust and less complex than threads for this particular problem I'd wager.

However, if you do use threads and need to process the content in one single place, consider isolating each File::Tail in its own thread, and (as others have mentioned) use Thread::Queue to pass values to the thread processing the data.

/J