Well, I would say you have these options to trap the error:

1. eval it and check for errors in $@
2. use an if/else statement as above.
3. use a little open B,"$blah" or error_subroutine("$!")#and do stuff in the routine.

The thing is, if you do not open the file successfully and do not write/read the data you want from/to the file correctly, it could (and most likely will) cause some problems down the road.

If you are using -w or warnings as you should, you might get those annoying little Use of uninitialized value errors which could keep your program from working at all.

The advice I would give you is, just die if something goes wrong because your program just might die later (unless you clog your program with double-checks everything). So, I would use this:

unless(open FH,"$file"){
    open(LOG,">>$log") or die"Error writing to error-log file...how we
+ird: $!";
    print "Error at ",__LINE__," here's what happened: $!";
    close LOG;
}else{
    proceed as normal....
}
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UPDATE: Thank you to crazyinsomniac for pointing out that open FH, $file || or die; will always result as true and hence never fail. Three cheers for my hero! ;)

$_.=($=+(6<<1));print(chr(my$a=$_));$^H=$_+$_;$_=$^H;
print chr($_-39); # Easy but its ok.
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