I am surprised by certain behavior of the perl debugger. Let's say I have this very simple program in directory ~/learn/perl/p5p: 

$ cat abc.pl
print "hello world\n";
print "goodbye world\n";

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I run it from my home directory: 
$ cd
$ perl ~/learn/perl/p5p/abc.pl
hello world
goodbye world

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I get the expected results. I now run it thru the perl debugger from my home directory: 
$ perl -d ~/learn/perl/p5p/abc.pl

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.49_04
Editor support available.

Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'man perldebug' for more help.

main::(/home/jkeenan/learn/perl/p5p/abc.pl:1):
1:    print "hello world\n";
  DB<1> c
hello world
goodbye world
Debugged program terminated.  Use q to quit or R to restart,
use o inhibit_exit to avoid stopping after program termination,
h q, h R or h o to get additional info.
  DB<1> q

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I get the expected results. Now I switch to the directory in which the progam is located and try to run the debugger on the program in that directory: 
$ cd learn/perl/p5p
$ perl -d abc.pl
hello world
goodbye world
Var=

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The debugger fails to stop at the first line of code, runs the entire program, then prints "Var=\n". If I switch to a directory underneath that directory and run the program through the debugger, I get normal results: 
$ cd xyz
$ perl -d ../abc.pl

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.49_04
Editor support available.

Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'man perldebug' for more help.

main::(../abc.pl:1):    print "hello world\n";
  DB<1> c
hello world
goodbye world
Debugged program terminated.  Use q to quit or R to restart,
use o inhibit_exit to avoid stopping after program termination,
h q, h R or h o to get additional info.
  DB<1> q

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I have no setting in PERLDB_OPTS that could explain this: 
$ echo $PERLDB_OPTS

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Why is the debugger behaving this way when run on a program in the current directory?

Thank you very much.

Jim Keenan

In reply to perl -d: puzzling behavior when run in program in current directory by jkeenan1

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