dump

See the current Perl documentation for dump.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

dump - create an immediate core dump

dump LABEL

This causes an immediate core dump. Primarily this is so that you can use the undump program to turn your core dump into an executable binary after having initialized all your variables at the beginning of the program. When the new binary is executed it will begin by executing a goto LABEL (with all the restrictions that goto suffers). Think of it as a goto with an intervening core dump and reincarnation. If LABEL is omitted, restarts the program from the top. WARNING: Any files opened at the time of the dump will NOT be open any more when the program is reincarnated, with possible resulting confusion on the part of Perl. See also -u option in the perlrun manpage.

Example:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    require 'getopt.pl';
    require 'stat.pl';
    %days = (
        'Sun' => 1,
        'Mon' => 2,
        'Tue' => 3,
        'Wed' => 4,
        'Thu' => 5,
        'Fri' => 6,
        'Sat' => 7,
    );

    dump QUICKSTART if $ARGV[0] eq '-d';

    QUICKSTART:
    Getopt('f');

This operator is largely obsolete, partly because it's very hard to convert a core file into an executable, and because the real perl-to-C compiler has superseded it.