I'll write this really quickly so you'll get the warning before anyone suggests that you do *MAILPIPE= *STDOUT.

Doh! ;)

But seriously, *MAILPIPE= *STDOUT seems to have become a common idiom, but I don't like it much (I used it once in a very special situation and even then I commented the code to say it was a "last resort" and likely still had problems).

One problem in this particular case is that when your program gets to the close MAILPIPE, it will actually be closing STDOUT and any further output to STDOUT will be lost.

What I suggest you use instead is:

    open( MAILPIPE, ">&STDOUT" )
      or  die "Can't dup STDOUT to MAILPIPE: $!\n";
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Then the solution to your problem is to create a "fake" version of that module which uses the same API and just echos back to the screen rather than sending mail. Change which use you do, and all of a sudden you are sending mail rather than printing.

Failing that I would take tye's advice above.

Seems to me that you should be able to do this:

*MAILPIPE = *STDOUT; # Point the MAILPIPE symbol to STDOUT's
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It's not nice to go mucking around in someone else's namespace. Further, when you alias a filehandle, your stdio library is going to get very confused when you seek, tell, close, dup and do other things to the underlying filehandle.

Use the open(MAILPIPE, ">&STDOUT") or die idiom instead.

That did the trick! Thanx

Inside that function, check for a $debug flag. If set, select STDOUT. Otherwise, select MAILPIPE.

You'll probably want to select STDOUT again after you're done, so you might have a generic printing method that combines the options.

Barring that, I'd recommend tilly's solution of a debugging module written to the same API. Why dup a filehandle when there are other options available that use less typing?

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
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Normally, I would as well. Except that when I first started the project, I knew that there would be a LOT of them. I figured that it would be easier to write them all in from the start, and then just change one line, rather than many. thor

yeah, I guess *MAILPIPE = *STDOUT is easy enough to do. I just get off on global replaces in vi, I guess =)

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
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print MAILPIPE 'blah $blah' if $mailing;
print STDERR "trying MAILPIPE 'blah $blah'\n"
  if $debug > 30;
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a