Sounds like you are launching scripts with shell as opposed to calling a module function. The easy way to redirect STDOUT to the NULL device when you launch the other program. prog.pl >NUL (on Windows). On Unix this is /dev/null and on Windows this is just NUL. NUL is a Windows reserved "file name" that just goes to the bit bucket. Of course you could use some other file name than NUL and that way you would have a file with the output in it if you wanted to look at it for some reason.