wget is one of those apps that dosn't play nice with backticks. It writes directly to the tty, and sends some messages to STDERR. You can try this with IPC::Open3, but you might need to use IO::Pty.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;
use IO::Select;


my $pid = open3(0, \*READ,\*ERROR,"wget --spider -nv  http://zentara.n
+et");

my $sel = new IO::Select();

$sel->add(\*READ);
$sel->add(\*ERROR);

my($error,$answer)=('','');

 foreach my $h ($sel->can_read)
 {
   my $buf = '';
   if ($h eq \*ERROR)
   {
     sysread(ERROR,$buf,4096);
     if($buf){print "ERROR-> $buf\n"}
   }
   else
   {
     sysread(READ,$buf,4096);
     if($buf){print "response->$buf\n"}
   }
 }

waitpid($pid, 1);
[download]

Output: ERROR-> 200 OK