You have a precedence issue.

I recently happened upon an brilliant online tutorial on this subject, but I can't find the URL for the mo (the issue is nevertheless well addressed in chapter 2 of Simon Cozens' Beginning Perl available online at http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/3145_Chap02.pdf).

The precedence issue was indeed (very succinctly) pointed out in fglock's reply above.

Removing punctuation, and simplifying, your key line is: print "Program Error!" && exit(0) unless $case; Just change the && to and, and it'll work:

my $case = 1;
print 'Program Error' and exit(0) unless $case;
print 'No problemo!'
[download]

hth dave