[sf-perl] Debugger goodness

David Alban extasia at extasia.org
Wed Mar 1 11:56:00 PST 2006


Greetings,

In the spirit of last night's discussion, I'd like to offer some perl
debugger goodies.  These are documented, but if you use the debugger
and you don't know about them, the cause of Badness in the Universe is
strengthened (and a kitten is probably killed).

The first goodie is the ability to page debugger output.  Use of the
pipe character ('|') before a debugger command achieves this.  E.g.:

    DB<1> |x $foo

The pipe character causes the debugger to pipe the output through a
pager.  So if you have a variable that creates pages and pages and
pages of output with the debugger's 'x' command, you can page that
output.  Or if you want to page something that's very complicated.  I
use less(1) as my pager, so not only can I page the output, but I can
operate on it in any way that less allows, like piping it through
another command (think shell command, not debugger command) or like
saving it to a file for further study/preservation.

>From perldebug:

     Configurable Options

     The debugger has numerous options settable using the "o"
     command, either interactively or from the environment or an
     rc file.  (./.perldb or ~/.perldb under Unix.)

     [...]

     "pager"     Program to use for output of pager-piped
                 commands (those beginning with a "|" character.)
                 By default, $ENV{PAGER} will be used.  Because
                 the debugger uses your current terminal
                 characteristics for bold and underlining, if the
                 chosen pager does not pass escape sequences
                 through unchanged, the output of some debugger
                 commands will not be readable when sent through
                 the pager.

Another debugger goodie is the ability to run shell commands from
within the debugger:

    DB<2> !!date
  Wed Mar  1 11:18:45 PST 2006

by preceding them with "!!".  Sure you could run them in a different
window, but the option to run them in the debugger session is there.

Another goodie:  gnu readline support.  In my shell environment I have:

  export EDITOR=vim

And executing 'o Readline?' in the debugger shows the value for the
Readline option is 1.  As a result, the debugger command line is a one
line vim window (similar to the effect on the command line of
"set -o vi" in ksh or bash).  That is, I can use vim commands to do
debugger command history recall and debugger command line editing. 
I'm assuming the debugger would do the right thing for:

  export EDITOR=emacs

A prerequisite for this, however, is that you install Term::ReadKey
and Term::ReadLine from CPAN.  Curiously, the perldebug man page says:

   These do not support normal vi command-line editing, however.

But I get normal vi(m) command line editing.  Strange...

The perl debugger kicks serious boo-tay, and is essential to my
personal "ide" (bash/vim/perl debugger/RCS/perldoc).

David

P.S.  The other day I stumbled across wikipedia's metasyntactic
variable page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable). 
That's what foo, bar, bat, baz, etc. are called.  Very entertaining
page.  I encourage Joe to add Garbagio::Fantastico to the page. :-D
--
Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors.


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