G'day stevieb,

It's your module and you can test it in whatever way you want; however, I'd have a problem with the separation of the eval block and $@ several lines later.

Here's a real-world ($work) example I wrote a few years ago that similarly tests for failure. In this instance, it checks that an abstract class can't be instantiated. I just grabbed it from git and only changed the class name to Abstract::Work::Class; otherwise, this is a verbatim copy of 01-abstract.t: 

#!perl -T

use 5.016;
use warnings;

use Test::More tests => 3;

use Abstract::Work::Class;

my $obj;
my $no_instantiation = 0;
my $eval_message = '';

eval {
    $obj = Abstract::Work::Class::->new();
    1;
} or do {
    $eval_message = $@;
    $no_instantiation = 1;
};

ok(! defined($obj), 'Test potential object remains undefined');
ok($no_instantiation, 'Test no instantiation of abstract class');
ok(index($eval_message, 'FATAL! Attempt to instantiate an abstract cla
+ss.') == 0,
    'Test error message from attempting instantiation of abstract clas
+s');

[download]

I normally attempt to capture the value of $@ as the first statement in '... or do { ... };'.

As a testament to the robustness of that code, it's from one of the core modules of a large 30+ module framework. The framework has been modified, extended and enhanced many times, and built on many platforms, over the last four years; 01-abstract.t was last modified in May 2018. It's a solid solution and you're welcome to adapt it to your needs if you want.

— Ken

In reply to Re^5: Can I catch a die from someone else's module? by kcott
in thread Can I catch a die from someone else's module? by bartender1382

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