What Is the Debugger?

The Perl debugger is a built-in feature of the Perl interpreter. It allows you to take any Perl program and step through that program statement by statement. Along the way, you can examine variables, change them, let the program run for a while longer, interrupt the program, or start it over again.

From your program's perspective, nothing is different. Input still comes from the keyboard, and output still goes to the screen. The program doesn't know when it's stopped or when it's running. In fact, you can examine your program's workings without disturbing them at all.

Starting the Debugger

If you are a Macintosh user running Perl, to use the debugger you need only select Debugger from the Script menu, and a Debugger window ...

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