I just figured out something I wanted for quite some time but never knew how to do and that is how to output stuff from a debugger-session into a file.

The use-case is the following: You debug a script and inspect a large data-structure via x $huge_reference.
Unfortunately this is really big and you would like to inspect it more closely in an editor, so you need to dump the structure into a file...

This is how to do it in the debugger:

First set up a pager like this: o pager=">my_file"
Then pipe the x-command through the pager like this: |x $huge_reference

That's it - "my_file" now contains the dump for you to inspect.

You can even set up a pager as ">>my_file" for appending.

I apologize for setting this up as a meditation as it may be common knowledge among Perl-hackers but it was new to me and I hope it might be useful for someone else as well.

In reply to output to a file from the debugger by morgon

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.