As you might imagine, Santa has a lot of large, long-running scripts which develop the occasional Heisenbug. As a result conventional debuggers can be a bit of a bear to work with. Fortunately there's Carp::REPL which drops the program into a read-eval-print loop once it starts bucking for a stocking full of virtual coal; some of the scripts up north are sufficiently magical to be sentient.
% perl -MCarp::REPL naughty.pl
Died at naughty.pl line 1225.
Trace begun at naughty.pl line 1225
$ ▋
While Carp::REPL's not a proper debugger, you do get a number of specialized commands for manipulating the stack or listing lexicals and lines of code. On top of that, you have the full power of Perl at your disposal. So, if you happen to load the core module Dumpvalue you can get an expansive view of the script's environment e.g;
$ use Dumpvalue; #or load via -M
$ Dumpvalue->new(globPrint => 1)->dumpValue(\*::);
-> *main::main::
%{*main::main::} = (
"\cA" => *main::
${*main::^A} = ''
"\cD" => *main::
${*main::^D} = 0
"\cENCODING" => *main::NCODING
"\cH" => *main::
${*main::^H} = 256
"\cI" => *main::
"\cL" => *main::
...
'File::' => *main::File::
%{*main::File::} = (
'Basename::' => *File::Basename::
%{*File::Basename::} = (
'BEGIN' => *File::Basename::BEGIN
'EXPORT' => *File::Basename::EXPORT
@{*File::Basename::EXPORT} = (
0 'fileparse'
1 'fileparse_set_fstype'
2 'basename'
3 'dirname'
)
...
'STDERR' => *main::STDERR
FileHandle({*main::STDERR}) => fileno(2)
'STDIN' => *main::STDIN
FileHandle({*main::STDIN}) => fileno(0)
'STDOUT' => *main::STDOUT
FileHandle({*main::STDOUT}) => fileno(1)
...
'|' => *main::|
${*main::|} = 0
'~' => *main::~
${*main::~} = 'STDOUT'
Setting globPrint allows Dumpvalue to act like Data::Dumper on steroids, and recurse into namespaces specified by the supplied glob. If you do dump a glob, you might want to restrict the output to a particular namespace, or ensure you have a large scrollback buffer. The standard Perl environment, plus dependencies of Carp::REPL result in 24_465 lines/1.6Mb of output.
Dumpvalue has other super powers of course, like the ability to specify which variables you'd like dumped by dumpvars with regular expressions.