in reply to
Blinking a row
If you mean in a normal text terminal, then look into the proper VT-100 escape codes. In that table "^[" is used as a symbolic representation of the escape character, chr(27) — in Perl you can use "\e".
So I think you want
print "\e[5m";
after which you can print your text. Disable it again with
print "\e[0m";
I must say: I've tried it, and it doesn't blink. I think the resulting behaviour is very much dependent on your terminal. Instead, I see dark red on black. At least it stands out.