You could redirect STDOUT to a pipe using the pipe creation command. Then, when you're done, you can read the entire pipe into a variable.

my $bologna;
{
pipe(READ,WRITE);
local *STDOUT=*WRITE; 
local $|=1; #don't forget to unbuffer
(your evil STDOUT hard-coded code)
$bologna=<READ>;
}
print $bologna;
[download]

Voila. Pipes kick *ss when it comes to storing variable amounts of data and handle redirection. Of course, this isn't a problem in PerlLand, but I welcome you to CLand, if you'd tag along...

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