This is a great question, and I look forward to others replies to it. The big problem is that there is no one size fits all answer to this question. If your perl is a CGI script you don't want to die before you've printed out some error message. In other cases die is just fine. If you've got a database connection open you may want to clean up so an eval block is crucial. For the purposes of simple CGI's I've used the following general purpose "bomb" routine:
#---------------------------------------------------
# subroutine bomb
# a somewhat ungracefull way to end the execution of the cgi
sub bomb
{
my $error_text = shift;
print "\n<B>Ho Boy! A nasty error has occured:</B> ";
#extra \n to close off the HTTP header
print $error_text;
print "\n";
my @mail;
if ($MAIL_BOMB_LIST ne '') {
&printbomb(\@mail,$error_text);
@BombRecipients = split (/,/, $MAIL_BOMB_LIST);
my $submission = join '',@mail;
$submission = "\n\n".$submission;
$sent = &send_mail ($BombSMTPServer, $submission, 'CGI_Bomber@
+acme.com', "CGI $ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'} bombed.", $BombReplyto, @BombReci
+pients);
}
exit;
}
# load error message and backtrace into @$array
sub printbomb
{
my $array = shift;
my $message = shift;
my($syserror) = $!;
push @$array, <<"EOM";
The CGI script $ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'} seems to be having trouble!
Error Message: $message
Sys Error is: $syserror
EOM
my $i = 2; # start back 2 so as not to print bomb & printbomb s
+tack frames.
push @$array, "Backtrace:\n";
push @$array, " Subroutine name | Line |
+ File \n";
push @$array, "----------------------|------|---------------------
+----------------------------\n";
while(($pack,$file,$line,$subname) = caller($i++)) {
push @$array, sprintf("%21s |%5s |%50s\n",$subname,$line,$file
+);
}
}
This code is obviously not the neatest, but it's very nice for debugging. It simply prints out the error message, but then e-mails the stack backtrace to the emails in the global $MAIL_BOMB_LIST
-I went outside... and then I came back in!!!!