Parsing perl errors

wumpus has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

We have various log files, and perl helpfully outputs error messages into them. We'd like to be able to figure out which lines we should get upset about. For example, "^Undefined subroutine in sort". Once I know this is a problem, I can (for example) email someone when this shows up in my logfiles.

So I took the perldiag 5.8.8 manpage and made a list of all 676 errors (noting that several that I've seen aren't on this list), made regexes to recognize them, built a test suite, and then thought to myself, "Self, has someone done this?", followed by "Self, this is kinda lame, surely there's a better way?"

I'm happy to make a cpan module if there isn't one. Or tell me, is there a better way? I mean, dozens of daemons running on hundreds of nodes can't be simple, but this is ridiculous.

Comment on Parsing perl errors

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Re: Parsing perl errors by Fletch (Bishop) on Feb 03, 2009 at 04:37 UTC
You might also look at splain which does something similar (post-processing perl's messages to show the corresponding diagnostic from perldiag). The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply]
Re^2: Parsing perl errors by wumpus (Sexton) on Feb 05, 2009 at 21:43 UTC
Yes, that's basically what I did. My next question is, would this make a good cpan module? Where in the namespace would it live?	[reply]
Re^3: Parsing perl errors by wumpus (Sexton) on Mar 06, 2009 at 23:14 UTC
Was this the wrong place to ask this question?	[reply]
Re^4: Parsing perl errors by wazoox (Prior) on Mar 09, 2009 at 14:31 UTC
Re: Parsing perl errors by jethro (Monsignor) on Feb 03, 2009 at 04:09 UTC
Building the regexes from the perldiag man page could be automated. Take every line after an empty line, do `s/%\S+/.+/g` and voila, there is your regex. In special cases (centrally compiled perl) the perl interpreter source could be changed so that all error messages are prefixed with a string like "PERL ERROR"	[reply] [d/l]