Brethern,

I must be missing something about using the debugger

• Setting breakpoints in other files — I'm debugging. While looking at function1 in file1, I realize the problem is likely happening on line 100 of file2, which is inside function2. I don't know how to set a breakpoint of a file different than the one I'm in. So I breakpoint package2::function2, continue till it breaks, clear the breakpoint, set a new breakpoint at line 100. Is there a better way?

  Similarly, if I use L to show me the breakpoints, I can see breakpoints in other files, but I can't see how to use B to clear them.

• Taming the printing of @_ — I've arrived at line 100. I want to have a look at @_. But there's a pointer to some big hairy datastructure being passed as the 3rd argument. 'x @_' prints way too much text on my screen, and scrolls the first two variables offscreen. Looking at the stack is better, unless the stack is tall (which it often is) or if there are more than four variables in the call. Is there a good way to see a terse representation of @_ ? Or a way to just print the last three layers of the stack?
• Fumble fingers and stacktrace — At line 100, I'm trying to match $_ against a long regex. It ought to be matching, but it isn't. I copy and paste part of the regex into the debugger commandline, trying to figure out what's failing. But I fumble finger it and the regex isn't well formed. The debugger now prints out a stack trace, with six lines of DB and Eval, followed by the stack of function2. Scrolling my recent history out of sight. Darn. All I really needed was it to ring the terminal bell, or print out 'OOPS!' or something. Is there some way to tame this?
• One key history — In the tcsh shell, I can move through the command history with the uparrow key, and previous commands with the other arrow keys. Any way to do that within the debugger?
• Emacs — perldebug says "If you have the FSF's version of emacs installed on your system, it can interact with the Perl debugger to provide an integrated software development environment. " Sounds good. Where do I go next?

throop

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