When the perl interpreter stops because die was invoked, your reference goes out of scope. So no matter what, the object is being destroyed because it went out of scope - see Destructors. The question you want to ask is "How can I detect in a DESTROY method whether die was called?"

A better question I should be asking is "Why do you need to know?" Is this just for near-term debugging purposes or do you intend to use this in production code? All of the ways I can think of implementing this involve introducing either unnecessarily complicated code or significant potential for spooky action-at-a-distance bugs. Both of these result in maintenance and code-reuse headaches.

Caveats aside, one fairly straightforward way to do this would be to set either a module variable or global variable in a signal handler so you can test in DESTROY if die was called. See die and %SIG for information on setting $SIG{__DIE__}.

In reply to Re: Is there a way to know why the DESTROY method was invoked? by kennethk
in thread Is there a way to know why the DESTROY method was invoked? by erabus

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.