No, you're quite right. I was being stupid and messed up, will correct that in a second so as not to confuse others.

The precedence issue is moderately easy to explain in this context. There's a standard Perl idiom

open FILE, "file.txt" or die "Error: $!\n".

This is the equivilent to

open (FILE, "file.txt) or die "Error: $!\n"

as the 'or' is evaluated after the open command.

If you were to try

open FILE, "file.txt" || die "Error: $!\n"

you may be surprised to know you'll never get the error message, this is because the || operator is evaluated before the open and so this is actually equivilent to

open FILE, ("file.txt" || die "Error: $!\n")

and so would only die if the string literal "file.txt" was blank. Not good. You get a similar thing with thing happening quite often.

Moral of this story: Generally use || for defaulting values ($a = $b || $c), but use 'or' for logic control similar to the above.

Oh yeah, and make sure your code dies when it gets an error, not when it doesn't.. I seem to have failed on this one