You seem to be asking for a fairly specific answer to a very general question. The context for the code could make a great deal of difference to what constitutes a good solution.

For example, if the while loop is in a sub and you simply want to bail when an error is encountered you could return or die within the loop. That sends a very clear message that an unusual condition is being handled. You could use eval for a block you can return from to achieve the same effect without using a sub. In some situations that may be a clean concise solution. Consider:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @items = qw(ok fine great bail);

eval {
    while (@items) {
        return if $items[0] eq 'bail';
        print shift(@items), "\n";
    }

    print "No bail items found today\n";
    return 1;
} or print "Bailed early\n";
[download]

Prints:

ok
fine
great
Bailed early
[download]