Logical or and Exclusive Or

Logical or and Exclusive Or

Binary "or" returns the logical disjunction of the two surrounding expressions. It's equivalent to || except for the very low precedence. This makes it useful for control flow:

print FH $data		or die "Can't write to FH: $!";

This means that it short-circuits: the right expression is evaluated only if the left expression is false. Due to its precedence, you must be careful to avoid using it as replacement for the || operator. It usually works out better for flow control than in assignments:

$x = $y or $z;              # bug: this is wrong
($x = $y) or $z;            # really means this
$x = $y || $z;              # better written this way

However, when it's a list-context assignment and you're trying to use || for control flow, you probably need "or" so that the assignment takes higher precedence.

@info = stat($file) || die;     # oops, scalar sense of stat!
@info = stat($file) or die;     # better, now @info gets its due

Then again, you could always use parentheses.

Binary "xor" returns the exclusive-OR of the two surrounding expressions. It cannot short-circuit (of course).

There is no low precedence operator for defined-OR.