How can I print text immediately without waiting for a newline in Perl?

Question

I have a computationally expensive task in perl, and would like to inform the user that computation is ongoing by printing out a period after each portion of the computation is

Answer 1

What worked for me was to put the line

STDOUT->autoflush(1);

before my line

print ".";

inside my existing loop. Didn't use the sleep for fear of slowing the things down even more.