Fellow Monasterians:

I know that the Perlish way to handle an errors, like writing to a file, is to die, print the error $!, and take the forced exit. However, because I am writing commercial end-user web apps, I can't just exit—I need to put the best face on the error and keep the program going. In review, this is what I was taught:

...
open UPLOADFILE, ">$upload_dir/$filename" or die "$!\n";
...
[download]

However, this is basically what I have been doing instead:

my $error = uploader($dir, $name);
print $error if ($error);

sub uploader {
   my ($upload_dir, $filename) = @_;
   ...
   open UPLOADFILE, ">$upload_dir/$filename" or return("There was a pr
+oblem uploading your file: $!");
   ...
}
[download]

Is it "safe" or "good practice" not to die? Or is there some intrinsic value of die that I am missing by not using it? Thanks all!