Greetings Monks.

I'm a beginning-intermediate Perl programmer and am currently working on a pretty simple DBI-based program. The focus of my question, however is not DBI-specific. Rather, it's a question about using (I believe) anonymous subroutines. What I want to do is catch it when one of my DBI statements fails. Depending on the error that caused the failure, I may want to just continue on or I may want to quit. My question is two-fold:

  1. Is what I'm trying to do actually an anonymous sub?
  2. Is this a good way to do what I want, or is there a better way?

Code follows, with questions in the comments: 

# This is just an insert statement.  What I want to do
# is catch any errors, and then vary my actions based
# on the error.  Can I do this better?
$newSeriesSth->execute() ||  
  &{  # is this an anonymous sub?
    if( $newSeriesSth->errstr =~ /duplicate/ )
    {
      # this error is okay, i don't want to quit
      print "Trying to insert duplicate row.\n";
    }
    else
    {
      # some other error, better safe to quit now.
      die("Unhandled error.  DBI says: " . DBI->errstr);
    }
  };

[download]

Now, given that this is acceptable programming (which it may not be), the special bonus question is why do I get this error message while running this code?
Can't use string ("1") as a subroutine ref while "strict refs" in use at line 167 (Line 167 is the if(..) statement).

~CubicSpline
"No one tosses a Dwarf!"

In reply to Anonymous sub as error handler by CubicSpline

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