Checking the return value from each of the Getopt::* variants is what makes these functions really useful. An idiom that I use almost constantly for command-line tool scripts goes like this:

my $Usage = "Usage: $0 -a [-b arg] whatever ...\n";

getopts( ... ) or die $Usage;
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When I need a reminder about the command line syntax for one of my scripts (this happens a lot), I just run it with "-?" as the only arg; since I never use "?" as an option flag, I always get the usage message.