I've never looked into it, but a few times I've had situations where the behaviour of backticks wasnt as I suspected. Have you tried something like

my $header=do {
    open my $php,'php -q /var/www/html/testing/header.php |'
        or die "PHP puked: $!";
    local $/;
    <$php>
};
[download]

Which although untested should do the same thing, but might work. Also try doing it via the shell explicitly. For instance on Win2k I might do "cmd.exe /c php ...". Anyway, usually when backticks havent done what I thought it should, one of the others has. :-)

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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}