Your workaround is a good idea. The perldb command "R" does indeed automatically stop at the beginning so one can edit the contents of @ARGV. But it would be nice to work in the command line style, specially if one might be able to cut and past in a new command line. It seems strange that perldb allows you to make source code changes and restart and it doesn't support some hack to support updating the command line. I suppose one could create some sort of function that would populate @ARGS that could be invoked before continguing - e.g. > cmdfix("-foo bar") but that just doesn't seem very elegant.