Not to be a "me too", but they are correct. What you get is about all you're going to get. Having recently had to do much error analysis and debugging of a recent project, I can honestly say, though, that Perl does give some good messages, in general. It's just the process of picking apart the code, and the data, to find the "loose thread". Though, the use of <STDOUT> and <STDERR> in Perl have been a major help in that respect. Printing out bits and pieces of data where you can see them will go far to help you realize where the warnings and errors are occuring.