Try 

   my $response = qx{svn checkout $svnPath $targetPath 2>&1};

[download]
This will return both svn's streams (STDOUT and STDERR) to $response which can be examined afterwards - at least on Unixish systems.
Another option would be IPC::Open3 (separte access to STDOUT and STDERR) or one of the CPAN svn frontends, e.g. SVN::Agent, SVN::Friendly::Client (although I've never used one of these before).

In reply to Re: How to get the failure message of the svn checkout command using system(command) in perl by Perlbotics
in thread How to get the failure message of the svn checkout command using system(command) in perl by priyaviswam

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