I don't get your broken pipe error, I get nothing. What I think you are failing to do is actually read the CCCC filehandle.

This works:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;

my $pid = open3(0, \*READ, 0,"ls -ltr | wc -l");
            #if \*ERROR is false, STDERR is sent to STDOUT 

#get the answer
chomp(my $answer = <READ>);
print "query = $answer\n";

waitpid($pid, 1);
# It is important to waitpid on your child process,  
# otherwise zombies could be created.
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