It appears I am missing something about the way this works as I am not able to implement it.
I added the backticks and it appears to correctly capture the stdout, I tried the following:

$script2 = `script1 arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4`;
$working_dir = &getWorkDir($script2);

sub getWorkDir {
    $text = @_;
    while($text) {
        if ($_ =~ ".*user_name.*"){
            my $dir = $_;
        }
    return $dir;
}
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This appears to never enter the if statement even.
I also tried using @script2 to store the output and then used @text in the sub procedure and then loop through it using foreach.
That way actually managed to enter the if statement once the line containing the directory was reached but still $dir was left empty.
I don't understand why the $dir does not get assigned a value. When I check in the debugger once I enter the if statement the $_ actually contains the line but I still can't assign it to $dir and return it.
What am I missing here?