There's no 'flush' command as such that I can find. I've been looking at $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH which may do what I need, but it's unclear to me exactly what it does. I'll check it out further. Any other ideas gratefully received.

I'm also looking for a faster way to find (i.e. discover the path to) a file by its inode number. Using 'find -inum xxxxxx' is very slow until the data is cached, which is too late. Any other faster ways to do this from within perl?

Thanks.