RISCOS "free" system call

Apologies if this has been covered before, but I am a new subscriber, and 
have not yet got all the FAQ etc.

I wish to get the amount of free space on a floppy for a copy program which 
is working from a web page. Not having used Perl modules, I decided to use 
the RISC OS "free" command via the system function. The "free" command 
sends its output to screen, so I redirected it to a file in order to 
capture the output. This works fine (after a little help from several 
people). Unfortunately once the screen output is redirected, any further 
messages from Perl (including the tail-end of the HTML on the page) are 
sent to a task window, not the Web page. Without the redirection of the 
system call output, the perl script returns all output to the web page as 
expected.

There are two questions.

1. Is it possible to return the screen output to the webpage?
2. Could anyone show me the way to do this with Perl modules? I assume that 
there are file-handling and disk-handling functions for RISC OS in these 
modules.

-- 

Regards, Phillip Marsden.

[email protected]