wget is one of those apps that dosn't play nice with backticks. It writes directly to the tty, and sends some messages to STDERR. You can try this with IPC::Open3, but you might need to use IO::Pty.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;
use IO::Select;
my $pid = open3(0, \*READ,\*ERROR,"wget --spider -nv http://zentara.n
+et");
my $sel = new IO::Select();
$sel->add(\*READ);
$sel->add(\*ERROR);
my($error,$answer)=('','');
foreach my $h ($sel->can_read)
{
my $buf = '';
if ($h eq \*ERROR)
{
sysread(ERROR,$buf,4096);
if($buf){print "ERROR-> $buf\n"}
}
else
{
sysread(READ,$buf,4096);
if($buf){print "response->$buf\n"}
}
}
waitpid($pid, 1);
Output:
ERROR-> 200 OK