note JavaFan <blockquote><em>If you call via perl backticks then only "hello" is captured, and "world" is still sent to stdout.</em></blockquote> I cannot reproduce that. <code> $ cat foo #!/usr/bin/perl print STDOUT "hello\n"; print STDERR "world\n"; $ cat bar #!/usr/bin/perl use 5.010; my $output = `./foo 2>&1`; say "[[$output]]"; $ chmod +x foo $ chmod +x bar $ ./bar [[world hello ]] $ </code> Or are you suggesting the OP would run a different command in backticks than in his open? Why would he do that? 949863 949908