As others have said, eval is your friend.

I have used eval once to catch division by zero, see Re: Stereotypes about perl. Here's the relevant snippet from it:

    eval {
    drr (
        @$zb-1-$p[2][1], @$zb-1-$p[3][1],
        $p[2][0], $p[2][0],
        -($p[3][0]-$p[2][0])/($p[3][1]-$p[2][1]),
        -($p[1][0]-$p[2][0])/($p[1][1]-$p[2][1]),
        $p[2][2],
        -($p[3][2]-$p[2][2])/($p[3][1]-$p[2][1]),
        ($p[1][2]-$p[3][2])/($p[1][0]-$p[3][0]),
        $col, $zb
        );
    }; $@ and do {
    $@=~m/division by zero/ or die $@;
    };
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