command buffering

A mechanism in Perl that lets you store up the output of each Perl "command" and then flush it out as a single request to the "operating system". It's enabled by setting the 0 ($AUTOFLUSH) variable to a true value. It's used when you don't want data sitting around not going where it's supposed to, which may happen because the default on a "file" or "pipe" is to use "block buffering".