Thanks for the responses everyone.

To clarify the situation I'm struggling with: The case I'm interested in is when I have a nice friendly error that I want to make available when there is a problem, but I don't want to force it on the user, even though it's probably the Right Thing to happen most of the time. It seems like populating a global variable or method would be one good way to do this, in conjunction with a system that could through the error by default (how DBI does things) but there are other good ways I'm sure.

-mark