Always check for success on system calls.

Always check for success on system calls.

Anything that can go wrong (that depends on Perl interacting with your system in some way, whether opening a file, making a database connection, executing a program via system or backticks, or the like) needs to be checked. If your program can't continue if it can't open its configuration file, die. If you have a reasonable set of defaults available, warn.

You would use Carp in places where you need to get the context of the error. carp <=> warn and croak <=> die, but they report more details, making debugging easier.

Update: confess gives you a full stack trace -- which functions were called, what arguments did they get. It's industrial strength.