How to deal with undefined returned variables.

Pug has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question: ⭐ (subroutines)

I'm using IniConf which returns undefined if the section does not exist. I have found that this works but it is painful to read:

if ( ! my $temp = $cfg->val("MISC","HASHTYPE") ) {
  $CONFIG{HASHTYPE}="sha1";
}
else {
  $CONFIG{HASHTYPE}=$temp;
}
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Is there a better way?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.