The Carp routines are useful in your own modules because they act like die() or warn(), but with a message which is more likely to be useful to a user of your module. In the case of cluck, confess, and longmess that context is a summary of every call in the call-stack. For a shorter message you can use carp or croak which report the error as being from where your module was called. There is no guarantee that that is where the error was, but it is a good educated guess.