This leads to another problem.. Is there any way that you can distinguish which process/scripts last wrote to STDOUT or STDERR if I reopen those filehandles to a temporary filehandle or a scalar as an above monk posted?

You can reopen them to a new filehandle for each invocation and keep all the active filehandles. Use select to see which have data ready to be read. (IO::Select might be an easier interface to deal with.)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";