Brethern, I'm puzzled by some behavior I see in the debugger. When I require a file, it doesn't behave as I expect. In detail –

I'm using CGI::Pretty to build screens for editing a data structure. On certain inputs, this was failing with an unhelpful message. To debug it, I wanted to run the program from the line debugger, so I could see the calling stack and so forth. But to re-create the error, I needed to call the cgi script with the same POSTDATA parameters.

So I wrote a small function that wrote all the 'param' parameters to a file:

print "#/usr/local/bin/perl\n";
foreach (param()){
 print ("param('$_' , '", param($_), "'\n");}
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which, as I intended, wrote a file that looked like

#/usr/local/bin/perl
param('p1', 'v1');
param('p2', 'v2');...
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I executed the script in the debugger and executed

DB<1> require "mydebugparam.pl"
DB<2> x param()
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To my surprise, no parameters had been set by reading in mydebugparam.pl. So, hacking on, I wrapped all the param calls in a function definition. I modified the code so it printed out something of the form:

#/usr/local/bin/perl
sub sn{
  param('p1', 'v1');
  param('p2', 'v2');...}
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Now I performed

DB<1> require "mydebugparam.pl"
DB<2> sn()
DB<3> x param()
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and saw the parameters set as I had intended.

Why didn't require-ing the param statements work, while wrapping them in a function def did?

Am I going about this all wrong? Is there an easier way to be debugging cgi forms that have large numbers of POSTDATA params?

thanks
throop