print $ref

REFERENCE$HASH

Or something like that, it's been a while. I'm spoiled by the Javascript debuggers built into Chrome & Firefox, although I'm not sure about the Node.js debugger.

Is there a shell (either graphical, or "Borland Turbo Debugger for DOS" style) for perl -d ?

(even the "view locals" command in gdb for C presents data more quickly than the built in perl debugger)

Try 'x' instead of 'print':

ddiederi@lomin:~/t$ cat p1 #!/usr/bin/perl

my $a = 'hi'; $a = { hi => 'there' }; print "Done\n"; ddiederi@lomin:~/t$ perl -d p1

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.49 Editor support available.

Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'man perldebug' for more help.

main::(p1:3): my $a = 'hi';

  DB<1> n

main::(p1:4): $a = { hi => 'there' };

  DB<1> x $a

0 'hi'

  DB<2> n

main::(p1:5): print "Done\n";

  DB<2> x $a

0 HASH(0x29e6eb8)

   'hi' => 'there'

  DB<3> n

Done

Debugged program terminated. Use q to quit or R to restart,

use o inhibit_exit to avoid stopping after program

termination,

h q, h R or h o to get additional info.

  DB<3> exit

ddiederi@lomin:~/t$