<aside>

When capturing output from external tools, I almost always capture STDERR as well.

As was pointed out recently, this is straightforward in recent versions of Perl:

 my @output = `$cmd $ip 2>&1`;

Perl strips the trailing redirection and redirects STDERR to STDOUT for you, and places both into the list. I believe this is also the case on Win32. Actually, I think this is the case irrespective of platform...

</aside>