I don't see why setting $| should make any difference ... yet it does.

I was surprised this worked, too. The parallel case in the linked documentation was for a system command w/ output (search: ls), so I chalk it up to the Perl buffer and c buffer actually being implemented separately.

If use of strictures has no bearing on a demo script, then I tend to dispense with it.

At the least, it tells folks who are looking at the scripts on-line not to worry about red herrings...

Glad my fix helped, at least with the Unix side.