A better approach IMHO is to have a centralized messaging/logging/debugging method or function that takes a message and a priority number, and use that in your code instead of calling print().

Then you can set the debugging level (e.g., with an environment variable, or a configuration option, or even just an option or an argument), and if the current debugging level exceeds or is equal to the priority number of a message, the message will be printed to STDERR, or logged to a file, or whatever.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com