Day 8: two handy debugging modules

Your script throws an error (or a warning) and you can't make any sense out of the line number. If you only had a stacktrace ...

... Carp::Always to the rescue:

$ perl -MCarp::Always script.pl

Now, every 'warn' and 'die' behave like Carp's 'cloak' and 'confess'. (And 'carp' and 'croak' become noisy too.)

But what if your script silently dies (because of a segmentation fault)? It won't output anything, so what can you do?

I once used Devel::Trace to find out what happens in a CGI script that suddenly died. Devel::Trace prints every line of Perl it executes to STDERR (Apache error log in the case of my CGI script). The module is quite old, almost as old as rlib. But it works good.

There is just one downside: the output is really large. :)

In case of a segfault, just work your way through it from the bottom. In my case it was a faulty database driver, that caused the segfault.

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I tell another debugging story and introduce another Devel::* module.


Links:

• Carp::Always (distribution)
• Carp::Always (documentation)
• Devel::Trace (distribution)
• Devel::Trace (documentation)