in reply to Capturing return value and STDOUT from system like calls

Maybe something like this ... 
Plankton@linux:~/perl/perlmonks> cat opentar.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open TAR, "tar @ARGV|" or die "tar @ARGV" failed:$!\n";
my @stdout = <TAR>;
print @stdout;
close (TAR);

Plankton@linux:~/perl/perlmonks> ./opentar.pl -cvf ../junk.tar .
./opentar.pl
./okaynow.pl
./SimpleType.pm
./coredump.pl

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Plankton: 1% Evil, 99% Hot Gas.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom