Having gone through something similar myself, I would suggest removing the eval and seeing how the code performs. When I see this type of thing I always wonder what bug someone couldn't fix.

Using evals to catch errors is a good idea, especially when the block of code is critical to normal operation in production code. Test the code well, try to anticipate everything, but also make sure the program gracefully handles errors in unexpected situations. This leads to the use of $@.

Bottom line: If $@ isn't used and reported, be suspicious.