$result can be non-empty i.e. iff $bin generates anything to STDERR .

If the command in backticks generates any output on its own stderr, that goes directly to the perl script's STDERR, and does not get captured/assigned by the backticks -- in the OP case, $result will still be empty, because backticks only return what went to the command's stdout.

Now, if the command being run in backticks included redirection of stderr to stdout (and no subsequent redirection of stdout to some file), then backticks would capture any stderr content along with any stdout -- e.g. if your backticks are executing a bourne-style shell, the following would generally include some sort of error message to the perl variable, along with any matching lines found by grep in ~/.bashrc: 

  my $result = `grep PATH ~/.bashrc /no/such/file 2>&1`

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In reply to Re^3: Running a C program from Perl by graff
in thread Running a C program from Perl by n4nature

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