[comp.lang.perl] aliasing in perldb

gaspar@STL-08SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Al Gaspar) (04/16/91)

	Sometime back I complained that in the perl debugger the help
information scrolled by too quickly (unless I'm on my Sun and can
use the scrollbar ;-).  Larry Wall suggested an alias that worked
great:

	= h system "sed -n '/^T/,/^command/p' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less";

I have attempted to put it in my .perldb file as:

$DB'alias{'h'} = 'system "sed -n \'/^T/,/^command/p\' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less"'

This works, but...  The but is that the h command scrolls through the
help information with less just fine; however when you quit out of
less the help information gets catted across your screen before you
see the perldb prompt again.  Is there some way that I can get the
two aliases to work the same as in the first example.  I do notice
that when I do an = or a print on %DB'alias, it looks quite different
depending on whether the alias comes from the .perldb file or not.
Below is a screen print of both.  The 'h' alias came from the .perldb
file; the 'hh' alias was done at the perldb prompt with the = command.

  DB<5> =
h       system "sed -n '/^T/,/^command/p' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less"
hh = system "sed -n '/^T/,/^command/p' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less"
  DB<5> print $DB'alias{h}
system "sed -n '/^T/,/^command/p' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less"
  DB<6> print $DB'alias{hh}
s~hh~system "sed -n '/^T/,/^command/p' $INC[0]/perldb.pl | less"~

I have tried this both on a SPARCstation under perl 4.0/3 and on a
Unisys 5000/80 under perl 3.0/41.  The results were identical.
Thanks--

Al

-- 
Al Gaspar	<gaspar@stl-08sima.army.mil>
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