This sounds like what I wanted to suggest. So maybe you'd have: 
if (my $result = whois($foo) )
{
    #here we do something if the whois failed
}

[download]
or if you want something more intuitive, name the "whois" function "is_taken" or something. I'm not sure if memory-wise, the $result above would exist after the if statement, but it's only scoped for the if statement. If it is only allocated for the duraction of the if block however, that'd be a good way to not have an extra string/token sitting useless in memory for very long when whois succeeds.

In reply to Re: (tye)Re: Nice style for interesting error messages by YaRness
in thread Nice style for interesting error messages by dash2

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.