Something that I find useful for this is diagnostics, which comes with Perl. This pragma is famous for giving verbose explanations for all kinds of errors, but perhaps it is not so well known that it also prints the stack trace upon dying. For example, 

# div_by_zero.pl
sub a { b(@_) }
sub b { c(@_) }
sub c { 1/shift };
a(0);

[download]

The output: 

$ perl div_by_zero.pl
Illegal division by zero at div_by_zero.pl line 4.

$ perl -Mdiagnostics div_by_zero.pl
Illegal division by zero at div_by_zero.pl line 3 (#1)
    (F) You tried to divide a number by 0.  Either something was wrong in
    your logic, or you need to put a conditional in to guard against
    meaningless input.
    
Uncaught exception from user code:
        Illegal division by zero at div_by_zero.pl line 3.
        main::c(0) called at div_by_zero.pl line 2
        main::b(0) called at div_by_zero.pl line 1
        main::a(0) called at div_by_zero.pl line 4

Update: Note that stack traces for warnings are not printed.

In reply to Re: Automatic stack traces for warns and dies by itub
in thread Automatic stack traces for warns and dies by fergal

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.