I usually do what sgifford says, and write my own mydie function to replace the built-in die (which, among other things, allows calling a function that wraps my error message in a page that includes such things as site headers, footers, stylesheets, sidebars, whatever, provided said routine does not itself call the mydie function), but there's also CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); The latter is simpler and useful for development, although I don't know that I would encourage keeping it in production code, since it potentially could expose to the user information you might not want them to have, which might be a security issue.