How do you capture stderr, stdout, and the exit code all at once, in Perl?

Question

Is it possible to run an external process from Perl, capture its stderr, stdout AND the process exit code?

I seem to be able to do combinations of these, e.g. use ba

Answer 1

I found IPC:run3 to be very helpful. You can forward all child pipes to a glob or a variable; very easily! And exit code will be stored in $?.

Below is how i grabbed stderr which i knew would be a number. The cmd output informatic transformations to stdout (which i piped to a file in the args using >) and reported how many transformations to STDERR.

use IPC::Run3

my $number;
my $run = run3("cmd arg1 arg2 >output_file",\undef, \undef, \$number);
die "Command failed: $!" unless ($run && $? == 0);