FIXED!!!

after watching  truss output and getting another set of eyes on the whole script, we found that a little piece of duct-tape was breaking the  open3 bindings:

this was in the child process BEFORE the actual processing was done:

 *STDERR = $to_parent;

and that broke the redirection for  open3 because of something about incorrect file descriptor numbers. . . .

In reply to RE: Open3 in child process not capturing errors correctly. . by geektron
in thread Open3 in child process not capturing errors correctly. . by geektron

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