Surely the eval{}; and die technique covers the things you are looking for.

You can die from anywhere in your sub. You can catch an error from a bunch of nested or strung-together calls. You get the message back without having to use return values. And you don't have to deal with the error until any number of layers.

For example:

eval{
  my $a = b();
  $a = c();
  ## etc...
};
if ($@){
  print "This error happened: $@";
  exit;
}

sub a{
  open FILE, $file or die "File open error ($!)";
  ## other similar stuff
}
[download]

-- iakobski