in reply to How do I get output from the perl debugger (perl -d) into a text file?

Two ideas that have not been mentioned (but may only work on Unix) are the following. You can prepend a pipe symbol | before debugger commands to get paged output. (I have heard that H. redmondiensis knows about the wheel and the inclined plane, so maybe he also knows about pagers.)

% perl -de 1

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.23
Editor support available.

Enter h or `h h' for help, or `man perldebug' for more help.

main::(-e:1):   1
  DB<1> %hash = 1..100

  DB<2> |x \%hash
~
~
~
0  HASH(0x8447fb4)
   1 => 2
   11 => 12
   13 => 14
   15 => 16
   17 => 18
   19 => 20
   21 => 22
   23 => 24
   25 => 26
   27 => 28
   29 => 30
   3 => 4
   31 => 32
   33 => 34
   35 => 36
   37 => 38
   39 => 40
   41 => 42
   43 => 44
39%

[download]

(Those squigglies before the paged output and the 39% at the bottom are courtesy of my default pager, /usr/bin/less.)

In fact, though this is the default behavior when one prepends a | to commands, you can customize this significantly, to tell the debugger where to send its output.

  DB<3> o pager
Option `pager' is non-boolean.  Use `o pager=VAL' to set, `o pager?' t
+o query
  DB<4> o pager?
               pager = '|/usr/bin/less'
  DB<5> o pager='>> /tmp/capture'
               pager = '>> /tmp/capture'
  DB<6> |x %hash
  DB<7> |X
  DB<8> o pager='|/usr/bin/less' 
               pager = '|/usr/bin/less'

[download]

In <5> I change the pager option from its default '|$ENV{PAGER}' (where, in your typical halfway civilized Unix system, PAGER is an environment variable that holds one's default pager), to '>> /tmp/capture'. This means that the output of debugger commands prepended by | (in this case, those on <6> and <7>) will now be appended to the file /tmp/capture. In <8> I restore the original value of pager.

the lowliest monk

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom