in reply to print behaving badly

I don't see why you are reading from the STDERR of the process, but then I'm not familiar with ufsdump.

However if you just want to read from STDOUT on the process the qx// command or backticks would be sufficient.

You might also like to have a look at this thread for some ideas on using open[23].

Update: wrote qw// instead of qx//, fixed.