Skip to Content
Mastering Perl
book

Mastering Perl

by brian d foy
July 2007
Beginner
342 pages
8h 30m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mastering Perl

Chapter 4. Debugging Perl

The standard Perl distribution comes with a debugger, although it’s really just another Perl program, perl5db.pl. Since it is just a program, I can use it as the basis for writing my own debuggers to suit my needs, or I can use the interface perl5db.pl provides to configure its actions. That’s just the beginning, though. I can write my own debugger or use one of the many debuggers created by other Perl masters.

Before You Waste Too Much Time

Before I get started, I’m almost required to remind you that Perl offers two huge debugging aids: strict and warnings. I have the most trouble with smaller programs for which I don’t think I need strict and then I make the stupid mistakes it would have caught. I spend much more time than I should have tracking down something Perl would have shown me instantly. Common mistakes seem to be the hardest for me to debug. Learn from the master: don’t discount strict or warnings for even small programs.

Now that I’ve said that, you’re going to look for it in the examples in this chapter. Just pretend those lines are there, and the book costs a bit less for the extra half a page that I saved by omitting those lines. Or if you don’t like that, just imagine that I’m running every program with both strict and warnings turned on from the command line:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings program

Along with that, I have another problem that bites me much more than I should be willing to admit. Am I editing the file on the same machine I’m running ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Beginning Perl

Beginning Perl

Curtis Ovid Poe
Mastering Algorithms with Perl

Mastering Algorithms with Perl

Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jon Orwant, John Macdonald
Perl One-Liners

Perl One-Liners

Peteris Krumins

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596527242Errata Page