Using Windows ActiveState Perl 5.8.8 build 822.

I'm extremely confused.

I just tossed together a simple script that would scan the Wizards Gatherer web page and spit out a card's ID and name, separated by a semicolon.

Now I'm a little out of practice, but I managed to get it to work first try, printing to STDOUT. I then said to myself "okay, why bother with the file operations, let the shell do it."

I come back in a few minutes to find no data in carddb.txt. It's reporting a filesize of 0.

I reworked it using IO::File to do the file writes itself. Thus adding

use IO::File;
my $file = IO::File->new('>carddb.txt') or die $!;
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That done, I ran it again, without the redirect, and found, again, no data in the file. I tried changing the file name to no avail. I added prints to STDERR to verify the data was being retrieved/generated, and I got exactly what I wanted out of it, but no actual data in the file.

Finally, I tried redirecting STDERR to the file and swapping everything (by this time I'd given up on having perl write to the file directly.) Suddenly, the file has data!

use LWP::Simple 'get';
use strict;
use warnings;

my $basePath = "http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?id=";

for(my $i = 1; $i < 129700; ++$i){
    print STDOUT "Getting $i ... ";
    my $content = get($basePath.$i);
    print STDOUT "Done\n";
    if($content){
        $content =~ m/<span id="_lblCardTitle">((?:\w|\s)+)<\/span>/;
        my $result = $i.';'.$1."\n"; 
        print STDERR $result;
        print STDOUT $result;
    }else{
        print STDOUT 'Failed on ', $i, "\n";
    }
    
    sleep 1;
}

print STDOUT "Done!\n";
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So, the question is, does anyone know why I couldn't get data from STDOUT to a file.. or into a file opened in perl?

Thanks.