I have a command line script that I wrote that includes a whole pile of other Perl libraries that were written in house, many of which are old, krufty, etc. While this is in fact a command line script, our primary environment is the web, and so I am suspicious that my problem is the result of people making assumptions about where the code would be called. So, my problem... My script does a healthy amount of error checking and dies with appropriate error messages. What I would expect to see is something of the form...

ERROR: User is a moron.  Please step away from the keyboard. at /path/
+to/offending/file line 42
[download]

but instead I get something of the form...

[Wed Aug  6 11:48:17 2003] scriptname: ERROR: User is a moron.  Please
+ step away from the keyboard. at /path/to/offending/file at line 42
[download]

I don't want this behavior because it makes things really cluttered. Even more annoying is if you trap and propagate errors then it sticks this extra junk on at each level making a huge mess of things. I added the following line of code both to the offending script which includes boatloads of libraries, as well as to some other script that does not include any such libraries and simply dies for the heck of it...

print "keys: " . join(',', keys(%SIG)), "\n";
[download]

This yielded a whole bunch of handlers in the bare bones script...

keys: ABRT,ALRM,BUS,CANCEL,CHLD,CLD,CONT,EMT,FPE,FREEZE,HUP,ILL,INT,IO
+,IOT,KILL,LOST,LWP,NUM39,NUM40,NUM41,NUM42,NUM43,NUM44,PIPE,POLL,PROF
+,PWR,QUIT,RTMAX,RTMIN,SEGV,STOP,SYS,TERM,THAW,TRAP,TSTP,TTIN,TTOU,URG
+,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,WAITING,WINCH,XCPU,XFSZ,__WARN__
[download]

The other, real script gave the following...

keys: ABRT,ALRM,BUS,CANCEL,CHLD,CLD,CONT,EMT,FPE,FREEZE,HUP,ILL,INT,IO
+,IOT,KILL,LOST,LWP,NUM39,NUM40,NUM41,NUM42,NUM43,NUM44,PIPE,POLL,PROF
+,PWR,QUIT,RTMAX,RTMIN,SEGV,STOP,SYS,TERM,THAW,TRAP,TSTP,TTIN,TTOU,URG
+,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,WAITING,WINCH,XCPU,XFSZ,__DIE__,__WARN__
[download]

It would seem that the difference between the two is the __DIE__ handler that some library, somewhere has gone and installed unbeknowst to me. I verified this by adding the following line to my script...

undef $SIG{__DIE__};
[download]

This got my code to die with an appropriately formatted message, but it seems a little krufty to do that, and I'd really like to know from whence the coderef that is in $SIG{__DIE__} has sprung. I could probably accomplish this, with some effort, by using some code introspection libraries. I am wondering though, is this a common effect of some well known library or other? I perldoc'd Carp and didn't get any leads from there.