Well, I figured out the 'newline' issue. Adding a newline at the end of the die() text suppresses the addition of 'at xxx line #.'. The newline comment in the alarm code example is given because of the 'eq "alarm\n" conditional further down. Without the newline, the same conditional can be realized using '=~ /^alarm/'. Therefore, the newline is not germane to my problem. (Although, I did add one.)