Test::Lives provides only one function, lives_and, which works almost exactly like the function of the same name in Test::Exception. That is, it allows you to test things that could (but shouldn't) throw an exception without having to have two separate tests with two separate results (and two separate descriptions). You pass it a block of code to run (which should contain one test assertion) and a test description to give the assertion inside the block. The description will be available inside the block in the $_ variable. (This is different from Test::Exception, which employs hacky magic to relieve you of having to pass the description to the decorated assertion.) If the block ends up throwing an exception, a test failure will be logged.