I agree with Abigail that it definitely matters who's going to see this message. If it's going to show up in an error log, I just make sure it's a unique string that I can grep for easily, something like this:

foo or die "sorrow, pestilence, Notepad: $!$/";

As long as I don't use the same error string twice, it takes about two seconds to find the place where the problem is.

If it's an error message that an end user is going to see, I do something rather different... 

  open FOO, "<$foo" or fatalerror "Couldn't Read Foo: $!";
  # and off in an include file somewhere I define...
sub fatalerror {
  my $email = $ENV{SERVER_ADMIN};
  use HTML::Entities;
  my $code = encode_entities(shift);
  my $fm = <<"FRIENDLYMESSAGE";
  <p class=\"error\">Oops!  I seem to have run
     into a problem!  This is probably a bug
     in the software on this site, something
     that the webmaster needs to fix.  If
     this problem persists, you can contact the
     webmaster at <a href="mailto:$email">$email</a>
     and report the problem.  It might get fixed
     faster if you include the exact technical
     error code that follows.
  </p>
  <p class=\"error\">Technical Error Code: $code</p>
FRIENDLYMESSAGE
  # And then I output a page containing $fm in the
  # usual fashion.
}

[download]

This is for CGI, which in my case is the only kind of interface used for stuff that end users see, but you can imagine a similar sort of thing for GUI stuff.

;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print

In reply to Re: Perl Style: About error messges opening files by jonadab
in thread Perl Style: About error messges opening files by demerphq

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