http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=452208

Once more, a great answer has bit the dust in testing. I wanted to give jacques a different answer than I did to Using STDERR and timestamps to write to a log file, namely,

local *CORE::GLOBAL::die = sub (@) { die scalar(localtime()), ' ', @_; };
but die keeps on dieing the same old way.
$ perl -e'local *CORE::GLOBAL::die = sub (@) {CORE::die(scalar(localti +me()), " ", @_);}; die "Foo!"' Foo! at -e line 1. $

Apparently, die is not overridable. It has a prototype,

$ perl -e'print prototype "CORE::die"' @$
and it doesn't appear on diotalevi's toke.c list in Re: !Overriding Builtin print. Now how do we know which builtins are overridable? Is die somehow special-cased to not be overridden, as glob and readline are to permit it?

Overriding builtins is indeed a tricky business.

Added: Thanks, tye++ and leriksen++. You showed me something I didn't really understand before. It looks like builtins are outside both lexical and dynamic scope, being resolved sometime while compiling. Localizing them has no effect, and the last-compiled override is the one which counts. It's still a little freaky:

BEGIN { *CORE::GLOBAL::warn = sub (@) { CORE::warn(scalar(localtime), " ", @_); }; warn "Foo!"; } BEGIN { *CORE::GLOBAL::warn = sub (@) { CORE::warn( @_); }; } warn "Bar!"' __END__ Foo! at -e line 1. Bar! at -e line 1.
It looks like BEGIN blocks are all compiled to a single parse tree before they run, but that's only guessing.

After Compline,
Zaxo