Assignment to a value only if it is defined

voj has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi! found myself coding a lot of ugly statements like this:

$foo = $bar if defined $bar;

This is fine unless $bar is a complex statement or a function that I don't want to call twice. Of course I could create a temporary variable which makes the code even uglier:

$tmp = bar(); $foo = $tmp if defined $tmp;

What I would like is a short and simple syntax where I only have to type each part of the conditional assignment once:

$foo =ifdef $bar

Any ideas? The code should be short and readable. Bonus points if $foo can also be a list.

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