take a look at the Development Support family of modules at the CPAN.. There are modules that will tell you what parts of your code are used and how often, report variables and their sizes, profile your code line by line - and lots more; too much to write about. Start with the standard Devel::DProf module to profile your code. Take a look at the standard distribution module "Benchmark" for benchmarking.

Read the perldebug section of the Perl docs about the Perl debugger, and perldebtut for a tutorial on using it. It offers interactive, step-through debugging and other cool stuff.

The Komodo IDE at activestate.com provides a GUI front-end to the Perl debugger.

Take a look at perltidy for code beautification and simple syntax verification. It's written in Perl too.

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Tommy Butler, a.k.a. TOMMY