If the errors you are returning can be expressed as errno values, just assign the numeric value to $!. Things should work as expected.

If you want to set error strings, try using $@ which is used by eval. Some CPAN modules (IO::Socket::INET for one) also use it to return error strings.

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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