All -- I know there are some similar posts, but I am not sure if I need to re-engineer my code. I have a forking queue that will spawn a child backup process, and log everything to a file. The only problem is that I am loosing stderr. Is there an easy way to do this without reworking my code:

sub fork_backup
{
    my $lpar = shift;
    if ( ( scalar keys %children ) < $max_children )
    {
        my $pid = (open($lpar,"-|"));
        if ( $pid )
        {
            #   this is parent process
            $children{$pid} = $lpar;
             print "Child Backup [$pid][".$children{$pid}."] started a
+t ".localtime()."\n";
             print MAINLOG "\nChild Backup [$pid][".$children{$pid}."]
+ started at ".localtime(
)."\n";
            $processing_time{$pid} = time();
            open(HOSTLOG,">>./$main_log_dir/$lpar.out");
             print HOSTLOG "\nChild Backup [$pid][".$children{$pid}."]
+ started at ".localtime(
)."\n";
            close(HOSTLOG);

        }
        else
        {
            if ( not defined $pid )
            {
                die "\n\nWoah: Failed to fork a child!\n";
            }
            #   this is child process
            #  This is where the meat goes!
            my $backup_command;
            if ( ($lpar_oslevel{$lpar}) eq "5.3" || ($lpar_oslevel{$lp
+ar}) eq "6.1" )
                {
                $sysbackcmd="blah";                 print "Sysback Com
+mand - 5.3: $sysbackcmd\n";
               #Put the real sysback command in here later (for 5.3)
                exec("ssh -q -o ConnectTimeOut=5 $lpar \"$sysbackcmd\"
+"); #Put the real sysback command in here later (for 5.3)
                }
            else
                {
                $sysbackcmd="blah";                print "Sysback Comm
+and: $sysbackcmd\n";
                exec("ssh -q -o ConnectTimeOut=5 $lpar \"$sysbackcmd\"
+");
                }
            #   exit child process
            exit 0;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        #   too much child labor! queue for later under complete_backu
+p
        unshift(@queue,$lpar);
    }
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