You'll notice that I am trying to explicitly merge stdout & stderr. The problem is that backticks ignore my explicit direction.
Uhm, you *are* capturing both STDOUT and STDERR. Other than that your test program is written in such a way that it neither proves, nor disproves that you are capturing both, what makes you think it doesn't?

Hint, change your print "Captured $x" in print "Captured --->$x<---\n" and it should be obvious.

In reply to Re^3: backticks fail to capture stderr even with explicit redirection by JavaFan
in thread backticks fail to capture stderr even with explicit redirection by keithhanlan

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