It is said in the Holy Books that the only program that can correctly parse Perl is Perl itself. I have taken this teaching to heart and have written a twisted little Perl tags generator (like ctags) that does not attempt to parse the Perl text itself. I have put it in Craft here. Instead, it runs as a Perl debugger, which gives it access to the tables of symbols and line numbers that debuggers have access to. And it works quite well.
Except for one thing: anything in a BEGIN (or probably also INIT) block gets run. If these blocks print to STDOUT they mess up the tags file.
Now I guess I could just use another file handle to write to and hope that the BEGIN blocks don't have nasty side effects, but does anyone know how I can gain control before the BEGIN blocks run? (I've tried adding the line
BEGIN { $DB::single=1 }
to the end of the PERL5DB env var but it didn't help)

In reply to Preventing BEGIN blocks from being run in the debugger? by bikeNomad

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