I understand there are several different flavors of perl on Windows boxes (vanilla, strawberry, active state, cygwin...), and I was wondering whether they come with anything like a Bourne shell, in particular, I was wondering how they handle redirection when shelling out with qx{} (aka backticks).

If you windows users do something like this, would you expect it to work (i.e. to give you the standard output mixed with any error messages)?

my $captured_output = qx{ some_command 2>&1 };

use File::Temp qw( tempfile );
use File::Spec qw( devnull );
$|=1;

my $code =<<'CODE';
  $|=1;
  print "ABC\n";
  print STDERR "012\n";
  print "IJK\n";
  print STDERR "345\n";
  print "XYZ\n";
  print STDERR "678\n";
CODE

# create a temporary perl script file
my ($fh1, $scriptname) = tempfile( 'yap_XXXX', SUFFIX => '.pl');
print {$fh1} $code;
close( $fh1 );

my $perl = $^X;
my $devnull = File::Spec->devnull;
print "No redirect: \n";
print qx{ $perl $scriptname }, "\n";
print "Redirect errors to devnull: \n";
print qx{ $perl $scriptname 2>$devnull }, "\n";
print "Redirect merging stderr and stdout: \n";
print qx{ $perl $scriptname 2>&1 }, "\n";
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