PerlMonth: Debugging Perl CGI Scripts

Apr 29, 2000, 15:14 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jeff Boes)

[ Thanks to for this link. ]

"This month, we're going to dig deeply into my bag of tricks and learn how to debug a Perl CGI script. All the tips and techniques here are straightforward; most of them are things you probably know from your first course in programming-that is, if you had one! And that just may be your problem: if you are a self-taught Perl programmer, you may not have received any formal education in debugging."

"Our first step: verify that the script is available for execution. ... The next logical step is to verify that the script compiles cleanly. You should as a matter of course start ALL your perl scripts this way:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use diagnostics;"

"There's a third line that you may wish to add to your code.

use strict;

I hesitate to push this on anyone because I don't hold myself to this standard (which most Perl experts would say reflects poorly on me, and I have no defense for that). All I'll say is that you should try it, until such point as you understand what it does: then, make up your own mind. Basically, this pragma makes Perl more like other languages that require you to pre-declare variables. "

Complete Story

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