note Arunbear You may need to adjust the parameters you pass to new(). E.g. with <code> perl -MFile::Tail -E '$f = File::Tail->new(q[/var/log/foo/bar.log]); print $l while $l = $f->read' </code> I had to wait 9 seconds before output was produced. But with <c> perl -MFile::Tail -E '$f = File::Tail->new(name=> q[/var/log/foo/bar.log], tail=>10, maxinterval=>0.5); print $l while $l = $f->read' </c> The output appears right away. 994616 994616