$? is telling you that the child process died with a signal, so its unlikely to be anything to do with perl itself.
Try something like 
open(QSTAT, 'strace -o /tmp/tr qstat|')

[download]
to see what's going on in the child process. (A side-effect of this is that perl will now see the exit status of strace rather than qstat, so close() won't report anything wrong.)

Dave.

In reply to Re: Closing a piped command gives SIGABRT/SIGIOT by dave_the_m
in thread Closing a piped command gives SIGABRT/SIGIOT by talexb

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