in reply to how can I redirect the output of a program and get the exit code too?

If you are after the exit code then I am assuming that the redirection you have in mind is on the terminal. This is not really a perl thing and dependent on your shell. Try typing help and going from there. Below are a few pointers for bash on linux though: 
$ perl buggy_code.pl > /dev/null   # Send all nonwarnings to bit bin

$ perl buggy_code.pl 2> errors.txt # send errors to a file

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--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics

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