Unattended Execution (Programming Perl)

20.4. Unattended Execution

During startup, options are initialized from $ENV{PERLDB_OPTS}. You may place the initialization options TTY, noTTY, ReadLine, and NonStop there.

If your init file contains:

parse_options("NonStop=1 LineInfo=tperl.out AutoTrace");

then your program will run without human intervention, putting trace information into the file db.out. (If you interrupt it, you'd better reset LineInfo to /dev/tty if you expect to see anything.)

The following options can be specified only at startup. To set them in your init file, call parse_options("OPT=VAL").

TTY

The terminal to use for debugging I/O.

noTTY

If set, the debugger goes into NonStop mode and will not connect to a terminal. If interrupted (or if control goes to the debugger via explicit setting of $DB::signal or $DB::single from the Perl program), it connects to a terminal specified in the TTY option at startup, or to a terminal found at run time using the Term::Rendezvous module of your choice.

This module should implement a method named new that returns an object with two methods: IN and OUT. These should return filehandles for the debugger to use its input and output correspondingly. The new method should inspect an argument containing the value of $ENV{PERLDB_NOTTY} at startup, or "/tmp/perldbtty$$" otherwise. This file is not inspected for proper ownership or wide-open write access, so security hazards are theoretically possible.

ReadLine

If false, ReadLine support in the debugger is disabled in order to debug applications that themselves use a ReadLine module.

NonStop

If set, the debugger goes into noninteractive mode until interrupted, or your program sets $DB::signal or $DB::single.

Options can sometimes be uniquely abbreviated by the first letter, but we recommend that you always spell them out in full, for legibility and future compatibility.

Here's an example of using the PERLDB_OPTS environment variable to set options automatically.[1] It runs your program noninteractively, printing information on each entry into a subroutine and for each line executed. Output from the debugger's trace are placed into the tperl.out file. This lets your program still use its regular standard input and output, without the trace information getting in the way.

$ PERLDB_OPTS="NonStop frame=1 AutoTrace LineInfo=tperl.out" perl -d myprog

If you interrupt the program, you'll need to quickly reset to O LineInfo=/dev/tty or whatever makes sense on your platform. Otherwise, you won't see the debugger's prompting.

[1] We're using sh shell syntax to show environment variable settings. Users of other shells should adjust accordingly.