I'd also like to know if any of you have experience suggesting additions to the perldocs. If this gem had been there and in the right place(s) I would have saved hours of development time.

It is unfortunate that you didn't find this in the documentation -- my first instinct was to do a quick search of the perlfaqs on 'STDERR', which turned up this entry entitled "How can I capture STDERR from an external command?" in ferlfaq8. The faqs also mention how to submit suggestions for improvements or additions to the faqs if you are so inclined.

Searching the FAQs is as easy as: perldoc -q STDERR, or you could use my old faqgrep program (which I wrote sometime prior to the -q addition to perldoc, but I still find it more flexible and faster).

And since I've brought it up, I may as well mention that you can grab the PDF typeset docs of a literate version of this script from my publisher's website if anyone cares to see a tiny example of a literate program (written more as a tutorial than source code documentation).