Some of your options for dealing with terminal problems (or misconfigurations) are using Term::ReadKey or Term::Readline;, use Term::Cap; and use POSIX qw(:termios.h);. All of these, I believe, will give you options for changing the terminal's understanding of how to delete a character (among other things). (Yeah, I read the part about CPAN. Sorry.)

I was going to post some real code, but I couldn't remember how to get into 'cbreak' mode for my test to work; so you probably ought to start with the perl docs, rather than trust my code ;)