If the original poster wants to include Win9x in their definition of Win32, then the methods you link to won't work for them.

The most portable way I know to do this is:

use IPC::Open3;
my $pid= open3( "<&STDIN", *OUT, *OUT, "command" );
my @errors= <OUT>;
close OUT;
my $status= waitpid $pid, 0;
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        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")