You can use eval to catch, and then do alternate tasks:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $ok = eval {
    blah() or die "damn thing failed!";
    1;
};

if ($ok){
    print "success\n";
}
else {
    print "failed, doing something else\n";
}

sub blah {
    # simulate a fail
    return 0;
}
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Now, the error will be in $@, but because there are situations where it can be reset before you get to it, it can be risky to do things like this:

eval { blah() or die "failed"; };

if ($@){
    ...
}
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Regarding my first full example above, if an exception is thrown within the eval, it'll set $ok to undef, otherwise if all of the statements execute successfully, the 1 (ie. true) will be returned.

Inside of the else block, you could check to see what the error is:

if ($@ =~ /timeout/){
    ...
}
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...but again, it's not wise to solely rely on that variable in all cases.