Hi. The standard way of dealing with "die" is to place an "eval" around the code you call which might call die, and check the $@ special variable to see if die was called. for example, if the function "read_pdf" has a die somewhere inside it, and you want to safely call it, instead of

  my $pdf = read_pdf("foo.pdf");
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try

  my $pdf;
  eval {
     $pdf = read_pdf("foo.pdf");
  };
  if ($@) {
     #read_pdf called die, handle error gracefully..
  }
  ...
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This is the perl-way of doing "throw" and "catch" -- think of die as "throw" and eval as "catch".
NB: That semicolon after the eval block is important, and easy to miss. (It separates the "eval" from the "if" -- otherwise the parser will think the if is a postfix if, and you'll get a parse error).

Hope this helps...

-Jonathan