I was rather thinking of something a bit more structured that would list each variable with its attributes and references broken out.

Historically, various tools were used to examine a dump corefile, but I've not seen language-specific nor human-readable dumps before.

Aside from perl variables, all kinds of things will be on the heap for your perl process (eg: things allocated by libraries wrapped in XS interfaces).

-David

Yes, this is something you can do in Java. The Sun JVM hprof format (and similar formats for other JVMs) is not exactly human-readable but there are quite a number of tools capable of reading and analysing such dumps. The point is that the data is structured in a format amenable to analysis.

I realise that libraries and XS code may be responsible but somehow I suspect that this is less likely in my case.