[sf-perl] Debugger goodness

[Paul Makepeace]

Forwarding onto London.pm - thanks David!

Je 2006-03-01 19:56:00 +0000, David Alban skribis:
> 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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-- 
Paul Makepeace .............................. http://paulm.com/inchoate/

"If cabbage is cozy, then your body is a walking corpse stuffed with
 pills and receipts."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/