Yes, actually, it does. That's how the disjunctive "or" works. If I tell Perl to do_the_thing() || die(); then the Perl interpreter is well within its ri

Yes, actually, it does. That's how the disjunctive "or" works. If I tell Perl to do_the_thing() || die(); then the Perl interpreter is well within its rights to say "Well, doing the thing doesn't work, so I am terminating your script." Indeed, that is what one would expect it to do.