As you have already determined, the cat runs to completion. The reason is sort of obvious. Perl doesn't know, in advance, that you only want the first few lines of output. It's going to execute everything between the back-ticks first.

--
“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” - CS Lewis

In reply to Re: Slicing the output of a command by KurtSchwind
in thread Slicing the output of a command by fbicknel

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