I should have been more clear in my question, I'm not asking "how do I do this?", I already know how to do it. I'm asking "is this readily available already?" because it's pretty amazing that after all these years, there is no standard, easy way to force Perl to give a stacktrace when it dies.

In particular I want to be able to say to someone who's using my code and having problems, "run it again with perl -MDevel::Verbose and send me the output" and they'll be able to get it from CPAN and the code should work just as before.

I think that will also mess up anything which is doing an eval and then checking $@ afterwards.

Does it?

use Carp qw(confess cluck);
BEGIN {
    *CORE::GLOBAL::warn = \&cluck;
    *CORE::GLOBAL::die = \&confess;
}

sub foo { bar() }
sub bar { print "in bar\n"; die "badness!" }

eval { foo };
print "ack - $@" if $@;

__output__

in bar
ack - badness! at - line 8
        main::bar() called at - line 7
        main::foo() called at - line 10
        eval {...} called at - line 10
[download]

Same goes for throwing objects

use Carp qw(confess cluck);
BEGIN {
    *CORE::GLOBAL::warn = \&cluck;
    *CORE::GLOBAL::die = \&confess;
}

sub foo { bar() }
sub bar { print "in bar\n";die( bless{akey=>"a string"} ) }

use DDS;
eval { foo };
print "ack: ", Dump($@) if ref $@; 

__output__

in bar
ack: $main1 = bless( { akey => 'a string' }, 'main' );
[download]

So Aristotle's solution should fit the bill.
HTH

_________
broquaint

The first example is probably OK as long as your check against $@ is both strict enough and liberal enough to not be confused by the stack trace. The second example has a bigger problem, eval {foo} works but foo() on it's own doesn't give a stack trace.

The solution is not a one-liner, it needs to pay attention to $^S which indicates whether we're being eval()ed or not. It should also play well with other die/warn handlers. diagnostics does this. I'll submitting a small patch to add stack traces to warns and to allow a mode that turns off the verbose explanations, then I'll be happy.