Maybe I'm missing something, but if you are just trying to write a perl test script to produce TAP output from your binary which already produces TAP output, why not just...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
qx|./compiled_test_app|;
[download]

and then deal with it the same way you deal with your other test scripts, using prove or something like it, instead of trying to interpret the TAP just to produce more TAP output...