Well I was a bit hasty in calling it recursion, as it isn't really.

So actually you want the opposite (in a manner of speaking) of what you said, you wish to artificially enforce inheritance of die as *exceptions*. The code you give does exactly what it is supposed to, there is no die called within catcher, and $SIG{__DIE__} is re-localed to the catcher2 scope.

I think Exception::Class is what you want for that. Alternatively, here's some ugly code

local @stack;
$SIG{__DIE__} = sub { die(@stack, @_); };
catcher();

sub catcher {
    local @stack = (@stack, "Caught 1!\n");
    catcher2();
}

sub catcher2 {
    local @stack = (@stack, "Caught 2!\n");
    sub_that_dies();
}

sub sub_that_dies {
    die "Foo";
}
[download]

If, on the other hand, you actually want what's in yor original code, which is just to do something before (outter) dieing then I stand by the original suggestions, and also add END to the list; END output comes last though.

#=begin a
require 'b';
print "Hello World\n";
#This die can also be replaced with print && exit
$SIG{__DIE__} = sub { print "BOB!\n"; die(@_); };
a::a();
END{ print "Waka waka\n";
#=end a
#=begin b
package a;
sub a{
die("A!"); }
1;
#=end b
__END__
Hello World
BOB!
A! at /tmp/b line 3.
Waka waka
[download]

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"