Anyone have any experience with the EXEC function?

I am trying to exec a perl script from my php code. Here is what I have: exec("perlpath/perlscript.pl $var", $array) The perl script runs fine as I am piping the results to a txt file also...so I know that the script is running fine. I am printing the result of the perl script to STDOUT which is what is recommended in order to retrieve the result of the perl script back into PHP through the $array variable set above. However in my php the $array is always empty? After the perl script has run I am doing this in PHP: $error = $array[0]; echo "$error"; Is my syntax correct? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Batch