is there really any benifit to writing...(snip)...other than to avoid the warnings?

Yes, the former is more clear in its intent, the latter is a longer and more obfuscated way of writing print $var unless $var eq '' (update: and even that may as well be just print $var ...printing an empty string shouldn't make a difference anyway...though I assume this is just a simple example and you could have, e.g., print "blah blah $foo blah" unless defined $foo)