in reply to How to output backtick or qx to a variable and STDOUT at the same time?

What I suspect your tutor wants you to prove you understand is that assignment returns the value assigned on success.
Try the following 
 perl -e 'print $out=qx(ls  );print "+" x 80 , "\n";print $out'

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print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom