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
+);
    }
}
[download]

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!!!!

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