Normally if a part of a pipe fails, depending on the location, it won't be detected. This breaks down a command involving pipes and runs each command separately. It uses open3 to run each chunk of the pipe. use IO::MultiPipe; my $pipes = IO::MultiPipe->new(); #This sets the pipe that will be run. $pipes->set('sed s/-// | sed s/123/abc/ | sed s/ABC/abc/'); if ($pipes->{error}){ print "Error!\n"; } #'123-ABCxyz' through the command set above. my $returned=$pipes->run('123-ABCxyz'); WWW: https://metacpan.org/release/IO-MultiPipe