Compilation phases: BEGIN, CHECK, INIT, END

---

BEGIN {
    # do something here
}

* You can have more than one of each one

BEGIN  - execute as soon as possible (compiled)
CHECK  - execute after the whole script was compiled
INIT   - execute before running starts
END    - execute as late as possible (after exit() or die())

When running perl -c script.pl   both the BEGIN and CHECK blocks are executed.

perldoc perlmod

examples/advanced-perl/begin_end.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

END {
    print "END\n";
}

print "BODY\n";
my $x = 0;
print 1/$x;          # error the program stops working

print "AFTER ERROR\n";

BEGIN {
    print "BEGIN\n";
}

print "After BEGIN block\n";

BEGIN
BODY
Illegal division by zero at examples/other/begin_end.pl line 11.
END

examples/advanced-perl/phases.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

BEGIN {
    print "BEGIN\n";
}

CHECK {
    print "CHECK\n";
}


INIT {
    print "INIT\n";
}

END {
    print "END\n";
}

print "BODY\n";

BEGIN
CHECK
INIT
BODY
END