Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Fatal

Provides a way to replace functions that return false on failure with equivalents that die instead, so you can use the functions without having to test the return values explicitly. Fatal reports errors via die; you can trap them with $SIG{_ _DIE_ _} if you want to take action before the program exits. You can use Fatal for both user-defined functions and Perl core operators except exec and system.