I don't need to get any better at debugging or testing, and my programming ways don't need to change. Anyway, all that is irrelevant to my question.

<VOICE "Bill Cosby">Right!

Hubris is one of the virtues of a programmer. This isn't hubris. This is "stick my head in the sand". This is "stick my fingers in my ears and say 'I can't hear you'". Hubris does not mean you claim personal perfection. You make that claim, and, like most such claims, it is just flat wrong.

You need to step back and chill out, dude.

If this were Usenet, people would be commenting on the tightness of the death spiral. Pull up! Pull up!

No, wait. Roll out, *then* pull up! You keep pullin up, but all it does is make the spiral tighter. Pretty soon, the wings come off.

You seem to have gotting yourself heavily invested in this tool thingy. You come asking for wisdom, but you do worse than ignore it. You are like the guy trapped by floods who spurned two boats and a helicopter come to rescue him saying "God will save me". When he then gets a chance to ask God why he didn't, God says "I sent two boats and a helicopter. Whadda ya want?"

I'm getting tired of downvoting your nodes -- the ones that really deserve it. It's not fun. When more than half, and perhaps two-thirds of all the nodes you have written have a negative reputation, one has to wonder. The big foam clue bats are getting ratty from the amount of use they have gotten on your account.

Exactly.

When one person tells you you're drunk, just shrug it off.
When ten people tell you you're drunk, then sleep it off.
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After probably more then a dozen replies to VarStructor and VarStructor 1.0 NOBODY BUT MYSELF found a single bug, except when someone spent 6 hours analyzing the code,

and even then, the bugs he found would have been noticed in use only in rare occasions.

I know you would dismiss an in-depth discussion about how you can't parse Perl with regular expressions as just "academic" and therefore stupid. If you're really interested, find a book on formal language theory and models of computation. The point is that not being able to parse Perl with regular expressions is a fact. You whine and whine about how lexicals and use strict are so restrictive, but now anyone who uses this code you release will be restricted to the coding style that are recognized by your basic regexes.

And it's not as though nobody tried to find bugs. I got plenty of bogus complaints about the code.

I don't need to get any better at debugging or testing, and my programming ways don't need to change. Anyway, all that is irrelevant to my question.

Chain GNU tools together and parse things? The change to my script to produce the output you showed wouldn't take much time or code. Sounds like you want me to spend extra time to do it the way you would from scratch. That doesn't sound appealing.