You might have cribbed that from an idiom, like: open my $fh, q{<}, $file || die $!

That's not an idiom, it's wrong because of incorrect precedence: "open" Best Practices.

Also, just in case you're implying otherwise, eval or die is a decent approach to work around Bug in eval in pre-5.14.

Update: It is uncool to update a node in a way that renders replies confusing or meaningless. Mark your updates. Update 2: Now fixed.