Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.

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

If you're just a random program, you can do this to find out what the currently compiled package is:

    my $packname = __PACKAGE__;

But if you're a method and you want to print an error message that includes the kind of object you were called on (which is not necessarily the same as the one in which you were compiled):

    sub amethod {
        my $self  = shift;
        my $class = ref($self) || $self;
        warn "called me from a $class object";
    }