For Q1, %SIG is the answer, as noted above.

For Q2, it depends on what you need to do. If you don't need the command output you can just redirect the output to /dev/null. Backticks, or qx//, shouldn't print anything to STDOUT, so maybe you're getting some of hte progam STDERR instead. You can try to execute the command as my @output = `$command 2>&1`, or go to IPC::Open2 or IPC::Open3 if you need to parse the output.