Further to exception handling being well supported on CPAN for many years (as pointed out by hippo above), note that an officially endorsed Try-Catch Exception Handling notation was released with core perl 5.34 as an experimental feature.

See also:

• Ten Essential Development Practices by Damian Conway: Throw Exceptions Instead of Returning Special Values or Setting Flags (an essential practice in Perl way back in 2005) - see also Perl Best Practices, Chapter 13, Error Handling.
• Best practices for handling errors by v_melnik (2014)
• SO question about Perl exception handling (2010)

• EyeBall stumps BodBall (Error Handling) (2023)
• New built-in perl5.38 try/catch syntax (2023)

On CPAN:

• Try::Tiny by Karen Etheridge
• TryCatch by Ash Berlin

Update

As mentioned at New built-in perl5.38 try/catch syntax:

• perl v5.34 added try/catch syntax based on CPAN module Syntax::Keyword::Try
• perl v5.36 added "finally" blocks to try/catch, also inspired by Syntax::Keyword::Try
• perl v5.36 added use feature 'defer', allowing you to create defer blocks that run at the time that execution leaves the block it's declared inside (which seems to be inspired by the classic RAII programming idiom)
• use v5.36 implies use strict and use warnings
• use v5.38 implies use feature 'try'

As noted at On Interfaces and APIs:

• Perl 5's "string eval" and "block eval" is an example of violation of the "principle of distinction", aka "different things should look different"

Updated: added more references

Exceptions are not an explicit part of the Perl language, but fatal errors are and can serve a similar purpose. However, as with many other topics, exceptions are well catered for on CPAN with almost 4000 results for "exception". If you do want to use exceptions with Perl there are many ways to do so.

Perl has exceptions, and that's nothing new. Exceptions are thrown using die, and caught using eval BLOCK.

Differences:

• Perl operators don't throw exceptions, while the corresponding IO libraries in other languages might.

• Perl exceptions don't automatically come with a stack trace, whereas it's common elsewhere. It's definitely possible to get stack trace from exceptions in Perl, through. See Carp::Always.

> Perl operators don't throw exceptions, while the corresponding IO libraries in other languages might.

could you please elaborate what you mean?

  DB<37> eval { 1/0 } or print "<$@>"
<Illegal division by zero at (eval 46)[c:/Strawberry/perl/lib/perl5db.
+pl:738] line 2.
>
  DB<38>
[download]

edit

Probably you are talking about the kind of non-error "message" exceptions , e.g. thrown by iterators like in Python???

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

I think the distinction being made is maybe that in (say) Java trying to print on a closed filehandle object would throw an IOException which your code would be required to handle, whereas perl  -E 'close(STDOUT);say qq{FOOP}' will run (producing no output but also not printing any sort of error (although you could check the return from say and print $!)).

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

ok, so you found an exception. Well, kinda. There's no IO library function that corresponds to division.

Anyway, the point stands: Where other languages might use exception, Perl primarily returns false on error.

Update: Clearer wording