Only if the code you are executing "dies" or throws a warning, in the perl sense, would eval return something in $@.

But as I wrote, there are cases where the code in the eval can die, and $@ doesn't get set (Update: or to be more specific, gets clobbered so that it's no longer available after the eval). A simple demo of this bug:

use warnings;
use strict;

sub Foo::DESTROY { eval {} }

eval {
    for (bless {}, "Foo") {
        print "Hello";
        die "KABOOM";
    }
};
print "<$@>\n";  # Where's the kaboom? There was supposed
                 # to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
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Even on Perl 5.26, this only prints "Hello<>". That's why the eval { ...; 1 } or do { ... }; pattern is better - choroba showed how that pattern still works even in the presence of a similar bug on Perls <5.14 here.

If the routines you are running return a status, then you want to catch that status coming back from eval

I would suggest writing it this way, where of course 3+4 is a stand-in for something more complex (and it may also be a false value):

my $status;
eval '$status = 3+4; 1' or warn $@||"unknown error";
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