A simple example would be printing information to the screen, and updating it every 5 seconds. I've seen other users emulated this by clearing the console and re-printing the information.

Yes, Perl can do that, you just have to open a pipe to 'more' or 'less' for output. I think that this will be helpful albeit tedious to work thru.. A Good "less" Man Page.

It is also possible to use Tk or other Graphical application libraries to get even finer control.

Basically, you are on the right track. If it is possible to do it in 'C', it is possible to do it in Perl. But for this application, I suspect that a scrollable GUI window with text lines will be easier to implement than fiddling around with "less" or "more" screen oriented command characters.