This was hinted at in a couple of the above replies, but combined with die (or croak) perl's eval provides a handy way to implement simple exception handling similar to the try/catch of other languages like Java and JavaScript.

# some code that might fail
eval {
  open MYFILE, "> some_file.txt" or die $!;
  ...
  close MYFILE;
};

# catch the "exception"
if ($@) {
  print "Errors during file operation: $@\n";
}
[download]

For more, search for "exception" on CPAN; there are several modules that provide more elaborate exception handling mechanisms.