Coming from a Pascal background initially, Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 - which shows my age, I always used to rely on print statements, because at that time there wasn't a debugger. That habit carried on in to my Perl programming until I discovered -ptkdb.

That said, it really depends on the complexity of the problem for me. I always start with the print statements if it's something that just doesn't seem right, but if it's more involved I always reack for ptkdb. I've never tried your approach since the ptkdb allowed me to add and delete variables at my leisure to watch them change.

Now if they just had one that would help monitor Tk apps...

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.