The first one works as expected for me. Parent goes into the file, child goes to STDOUT. The second one does the same as mine. I've tested it on Activeperl 5.8.2 on WinXP Home and 5.8.3 on Win2000 Pro. It prints both child and parent into test.txt even though, from what I understand, the child shouldn't be able to manipluate the parent's STDOUT.