flush perl's print buffer

sometimes, if you put a print statement inside of a loop that runs really really quickly, you won't see the output of your print statement until the program terminates. sometimes, you don't even see the output at all. the solution to this problem is to "flush" the output buffer after each print statement; this can be performed in perl with the following command:

$|++;

[update]
as has been pointed out by r. schwartz, i've misspoken; the above command causes print to flush the buffer preceding the next output.