I don't know if I answer you question, but I post anyway!

There is the pipe-way:

open PIPE_ONE, 'echo -e "oranges"|' or die "Can't fork";
open PIPE_TWO, 'echo -e "apples"|' or die "Can't fork (again?)";

my $line_pipe_one = readline(*PIPE_ONE);
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Then these behaves as normal files. Ofcourse if you put the pipe at the beginning is a command you write to:

open PIPE_THREE, '| wc -l';
print PIPE_THREE "Hello World\n";
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