This version of Debugger Kit has the following improvements over version in 5.001: 1) Minor bugs corrected; 2) ReadLine support when used with ReadLine 0.5; 3) New 'h topic' command; 4) New 'O' command to set options, type `h O' to see help; 5) Can recursively dump variables (subject to some Options): see 'x', 'O'. 6) Does not print a lot of junk with 'X' and 'V' (subject to options). 7) Commands 'X', 'V' and 'S' take regexp's. 0.7: 8) Interruptable during dumping. 9) data internal to perl (like `undef', `GLOB(0x03)') is printed without quotes; 10) defaults for printing style are saner now (prints FileHandles for globs by default). 11) Rendezvous code added: if started with PERLDB_NOTTY set, the debugger runs stealthy until `kill -2' or equivalent. At this moment tries to find a tty and uses it for user interaction (see comments at start of perl5db.pl). 0.8: 12) All configuration is moved to PERLDB_OPTS env. variable. 13) Additional configuration options added: Now it is possible to a) run your program in one tty (or as a daemon), b) debug it in a different one, c) show the current line info into a third one (or pipe to external program of your choice - hi, tom), d) postpone the debugger startup until the first INTERRUPT, e) postpone the choice of the tty to use until the first INTERRUPT. (mostly independently of each other). You can set your dumping preferences from PERLDB_OPTS too. 14) "empty array" message added. 15) \0 are shown in strings when q=". 16) repeated `a' on the same line works now. 17) If you install a patch to pp_ctl.c, recursive debugging works: you can interrupt commands given from the debugger command line, step, next, or trace through them with new extended commands [snt] expression 0.9 18) Bug with standalone `p' corrected. INSTALL Move the files from DB directory to a directory perl reads its modules from. You can find these directories by perl -le 'print "@INC"' and change them by setting PERL5DB and/or PERLDB. Microdocumentations available on 'h' command and at start of perl5db.pl. The files in DB/Term directory should be copied to the Term subdirectory of above directory. If you want recursive debugging, you need to apply the supplied unofficial unofficial patch to perl. I would like to here about all the anomalies you encounter with recursive debugging, since it is very new feature. READLINE support Out of the box package comes with stub only. Get the ReadLine package from the location below. AUTHOR/BUGS Modifications by ilya@math.ohio-state.edu (Ilya Zakharevich) Std place for latest version: ftp://ftp.math.ohio-state.edu/pub/users/ilya/perl