What are some good Perl debugging methods?
I use ActiveState Komodo for step-by-step debugging.
Eclipse has a step by step debugger for its EPIC plugin.
Personally I prefer the ActiveState version. It just seems more solid and stable, but it does cost (and work is paying for me). If it was my money then I would use Eclipse and EPIC as these are free.
I like Devel::Trace. Basically it gives you an execution dump, showing you the code paths.
On another side, test-driven development is all the rage now, so you could also be interested in profiling tools like Devel::NYTProf for highly advanced testing. See this Tim Bunce's blog post for an interesting overview.
Available tools for debugging
There are several tools available in Perl for debugging and similar tasks.
Built-in command line debugger.
perl -d yourcode.pl
Devel::ptkdb
Perl/Tk based graphical debugger by Andrew E. Page.
Regex Coach
This a free tool running both on Linux and Windows written in Lisp. Source code is not available.
Rx: A Regex Debugger for Perl
The Perl Regex debugger and an article about it written by Mark Jason Dominus.
A GUI for the Perl Debugger
There are lots of things out there to help you:
- Devel::Trace - print every line that executes
- Carp::REPL - drop into a REPL
*when the code throws a warning - Devel::ebug - a debugger you can control from Perl code
- Enbugger - use a debugger at runtime regardless of whether your process was started with debugging