Perl output redirection and gnu less problem

[gnidoc]

This is a small perl script I wrote to check mirror lists (files filled with one URL per line). It prints "[FAIL] http://..." when an URL can't be retrieved and just prints the url when everything goes fine. The code is pretty straightforward and it works well until I am trying to redirect its output.

There is one thing I can't figure out. As far as I know the program called 'less' prints its input on the screen providing a nice interface for examining the contents of another program's output.

less works fine in situations like:

perl -e 'print "test"' | less
ls | less
cat /etc/passwd | less

The problem is that using my script 'less' only gets the lines sent to STDERR.


linkchk.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Usage: ./linkchk.pl filename_containing_urls
# or cat file | ./linkchk.pl
 
use LWP;
$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->timeout(3);
$req=HTTP::Request->new;
$req->method("HEAD");
 
# create and urllist file
# try ./linkchk.pl urllist | less
print STDOUT "Why can't ./linkchk.pl urllist|less see this?\n";
 
while (<>)
{
        chomp($line=$_);
        $req->uri($line);
        $res=$ua->request($req);
        if ($res->is_success)
        {
          print STDOUT "$line\n";
        }
        else
        {
          print STDERR "[FAIL] $line\n";
        }
}
 

any clues?

(Fedora9, perl 5.10.0)

[eWish]

It appears that you are not using 'less' in the proper manner. This maybe be the reason that it is printing to STDERR. What is the error message that it is printing?

Unless, I am completely misunderstanding what you are doing with 'less'.

--Kevin