Thanks for the tips, all. I will have to go in and read the source for open3(). It turns out that the first approach (using sysreads) causes some processes not to finish, whereas I was not getting problems with the $line= scalar <$fh> thing. I only started messing with it because we have a particularly lengthy script, and the output wasn't showing up in the log even though the script had started. That may have had something to do with turning autoflush on in the called script though.