redirecting STDERR to STDOUT inside a program

[Li, Patrick]

I have no knowledge of VMS and right now I'm trying to port a perl script
from UNIX to VMS. 

The perl script uses open to call some commands and redirects its STDERR to
STDOUT.. for example:

open OUTPUT, "some_command 2>&1 |";
while( <OUTPUT> ) {
        #do stuff here
}
close OUTPUT;

My question is, would "2>&1" work on VMS?  I understand that that's just a
UNIX shell syntax and I'm not sure if VMS would recognize that.  If that
doesn't work, what would you suggest that I do in order to create the same
effect?

Please advice and thanks in advance,
Patrick