2 bajillion times a day I want to print a hashref and see whats inside. But every time I want to do that I have to type:

use Data::Dumper::Concise;
print Dumper $hashref;

First of all, thats too much typing. And second of all I keep forgetting to delete my print statements when I check in.

Happily I recently discovered Devel::Dwarn on CPAN. It is (basically) an alias to Data::Dumper::Concise.

The name is shorter which means its slightly less typing so I am already winning. But thats not the best part. Lets see how to use it.

On the command line I do this:

perl -MDevel::Dwarn codeIWantToDebug.pl

And then in my code I do this:

print ::Dwarn $hashref;

There are 2 levels of good here:

  1. Less typing.
  2. When I run my code without ‘perl -M’ I get compile time errors in all the places I forgot to remove print ::Dwarn $hashref.