I like the system explaination - makes sense. Thanks for the link.
The backtick case may have been when I was still battling permissions problems. In that case I believe you are right on the mark, because without correct permissions, the command runs, but gives no output. I'll need to re-examine that now that I have those resolved.
Unfortunately that still leaves the "open" case. This one is not permissions. The curious thing is that it does create a 0 byte file, then dies. I actually had two typos in my OP. Should have been:
open (LOGFILE, ">$logfile") or die "Can't open $logfile: $!";
