Mucky Monks,

It's the darndest thing - my script uses the DBI to retrieve some data from a MYSQL database then output it into a Template::Toolkit template. Among other things, these lines are included at the top of the script to give me useful debugging info:

use warnings;

# load modules
use CGI;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use DBI;
use Template;
use HTML::Entities;

# error output
BEGIN {
      use CGI::Carp qw(carpout);
      carpout(STDOUT);
}
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And everything runs hunky-dory. Script runs to completion just fine, no error messages output to the browser. So I'm done developing, time to turn off the error messages, so I comment out:

# BEGIN {
#       use CGI::Carp qw(carpout);
#       carpout(STDOUT);
# }
[download]

And it hangs. Just sits there 'til the browser times out. Comment back in, runs just fine again.

What the hey?

UPDATE: Problem Solved

Many thanks to philcrow and ikegami - using their various suggestions, the script now runs just fine with carpout commented out. Here's how I applied their info:

Via telnet, used the "Script" unix command to start script logging into a text file

script debug.txt;
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Then ran the perl script successfully by passing all the parameters needed

REMOTE_USER=username perl myscript.pl param_1=x param_2=y param_3=z;
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Stop the script logger

exit;
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This has the excellent result of outptting everything - error messages and html output - to the debug.txt file for review.

I found a few things, including a sub-routine that was present in two separate places (this script "includes" several others), and a whole whack of lines using undeclared variables in if-statements. Cleaning it all up magically made it run.

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