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Chapter 1
Perl Debugger
Pocket Reference
What Is the Perl Debugger?
In the ideal world, every program would be perfect the first
time it is written. In reality, however, even the best program-
mers make mistakes or forget to provide for all situations.
The Perl debugger is an application you can use to follow the
logic of a Perl program while it is being executed, saving you
time and frustration in tracking down bugs in your programs.
With the Perl debugger, you can stop the program at selected
points, print and modify the contents of variables, and print
stack traces out to see what has been called from where.
This book describes every command, option, and variable of
the Perl debugger. Any intermediate to advanced Perl pro-
grammer should be familiar with the debugger to save time
and frustration while debugging their programs.
Why Use the Debugger?
There are many ways to find out what is going wrong in a Perl
program. Reading through the code with a co-programmer,
for example, often helps bring revelations to light. The hum-
ble
print statement itself has probably saved more programs
than there are programmers; simply inserting
print state-
ments at strategic points in the program can reveal surprising
behavior that often leads to the discovery of logical lapses.
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