I'm running this on a Linux box (redhat 6.1), and what appears to happen is the SIGPIPE doesn't happen until a two updates have been done to the file I'm "tailing". I'd guess it was some sort of flushing problem, but the updates get sent to the live telnet session in a timely manner, and get sent to the file in question appropriately as well. So it looks like the problem isn't a perl problem at all, but some sort of funky buffering problem. Thanks!