Aye, you can use shift as though it's a variable. I do many a print shift;. It saves on typing and stress of coming up with yet ANOTHER unique variable name.

UPDATE: Adding code for the original question

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my @list;

push(@list, "blah.txt"), print qq(Error\n) unless unlink "blah.txt";

print @list;
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