Thanks ambrus. I needed to be able to print stuff to the terminal after redirecting STDOUT to some other file and your info (after a pointer from the Chatterbox) provided useful guidance.

open( SAVE_OUT, ">&STDOUT" )
    or die "Could not open SAVE_OUT:  '$!'\n";
open STDOUT, ">> $out_file"
    or die "Could not redirect STDOUT to '$out_file':  '$!'\n";
my $dd_version = $0 . " 1.1";
print SAVE_OUT "$dd_version\n";
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