No, perlvar sayz:

       $@      The Perl syntax error message from the last eval()
               operator.  If null, the last eval() parsed and
               executed correctly (although the operations you
               invoked may have failed in the normal fashion).
               (Mnemonic: Where was the syntax error "at"?)
 
               Warning messages are not collected in this
               variable.  You can, however, set up a routine to
               process warnings by setting `$SIG{__WARN__}' as
               described below.
 
               Also see the Error Indicators entry elsewhere in
               this document.
[download]

So that's something different (it returns the syntax error). use $ret=eval... for return values.

And indeed, that redirection won't work under windows. But maybe a real shell helps in that respect: try cygwin or bash4win.

Oh, and fixed those quotes. Sorry about that.

Jeroen