Unfortunately you can't prevent the program terminating like this - as described in perlvar:

The routine indicated by $SIG{__DIE__} is called when a fatal exception is about to be thrown. The error message is passed as the first argument. When a __DIE__ hook routine returns, the exception processing continues as it would have in the absence of the hook, unless the hook routine itself exits via a "goto", a loop exit, or a die(). The "__DIE__" handler is explicitly disabled during the call, so that you can die from a "__DIE__" handler. Similarly for "__WARN__".

local $SIG{__DIE__} = \&foo;
                                                                      
+          
                                                                      
+          
eval
{
die "Aiieeee!";
};
                                                                      
+          
sub foo
{
   print "COpped die";
   
}
[download]

/J\

kosun, as gellyfish's quote from perlvar says, you might be able to control things with a 'goto':

$SIG{'__DIE__'} =
    sub {
        if ($_[0] =~ /matched error text/) {
            print('Warning - continuing after error: ', $_[0]);
            goto &foo;
        } else {
            print($_[0]);
        }
    };

sub foo
{
    print("Continuing in 'foo'...\n");

    # Do more work...
}
[download]

Your app will then exit when 'foo' returns.

Remember: There's always one more bug.

You should only use SIG{__DIE__} for terminating the process cleanly.

update: eval doesn't spawn another interpreter. eval STRING compiles and executes the string, but that's not what you want either, you want eval BLOCK which just runs whatever code is in the block and catches exceptions.

update2: see also eval

BEGIN {
  ## Use CORE::die if you still want exceptions
  *CORE::GLOBAL::die = sub {
    warn "Problem? What problem? ... [@_]\n";
  };
}

use XML::Parser;

XML::Parser->new->parse("This isn't XML. Seriously");
print "All is well\n";

__output__

Problem? What problem? [
syntax error at line 1, column 0, byte 0 at /usr/lib/perl5/XML/Parser.
+pm line 187
]
All is well
[download]

die is to throw as
eval { ... } is to try { ... }