Marshall thank you for your reply, additional description for why one might want to debug the script without modifying it has been provided in the orginal question.

Maybe you can find all kinds of tricky debug statements to get the debugger to do what you want right now. However, you will not know that stuff years from now when you are debugging some modification.

I don't agree with this sentiment, I think learning to use the debugger and understanding how to use it to print and maybe even modify runtime behavior of the script without modification is a skill that could be useful years from now (i have a good memory and places to document the perl wisdom gleaned from this question/responses). Using print/debug statements is easy and effective, but I'm looking to further my understanding of basic perl tools and add to perl repertoire.
http://dave.thehorners.com/tech-talk/programming/94-perl-programming

In reply to Re^2: How can I print variable contents from the debugger non-interactively? by davehorner
in thread How can I print variable contents from the debugger non-interactively? by davehorner

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