This is true of perl 5.10 on Ubuntu as well.

You are missing the "\n" that flushes stdout before stderr takes over - I'm sure others here will explain this better.

:~$ perl -e 'print q|foo|; die "Fark"'
Fark at -e line 1.
foo

:~$ perl -e 'print qq|foo\n|; die "Fark"'
foo
Fark at -e line 1.

:~$ perl -e '$|=1; print qq|foo|; die "Fark"'
fooFark at -e line 1.

:~$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.10.0 built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi
[download]