I am using backquotes (qx) to capture a wget shell command with perl but my return value is undefined. When I try to execute the same command from the shell, it works fine. I am not using LWP::Simple because I find wget a lot faster. I am running this against thousands of URLS: 
$response = `wget --spider -nv $url`;

[download]
ie => get url, don't download anything, non verbose mode 
$response => ''

[download]
I just want to capture the status code from the headers taking into consideration any redirection. I tried curl but I need to parse the results which is one more time-consuming step. I am just investigating the best way to do this. Any ideas/recommendations?

Also while I am at it, any ideas what could be the reason for getting 200 OK status code sometimes, and other times 500 Server Error while retrieving the same url link using wget from the shell?

Thanks for your help.

In reply to Wget using backquotes by Anonymous Monk

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