The next stage is to create a package that aborts abnormally with a segfault, so you will be able to reproduce the problem and exercise the debugging technique explained here. Luckily, you can download Debug::DumpCore from CPAN, which does a very simple thing—it segfaults when called as:

use Debug::DumpCore;
Debug::DumpCore::segv( );

Debug::DumpCore::segv( ) calls a function, which calls another function, which dereferences a NULL pointer, which causes the segfault:

int *p;
p = NULL;
printf("%d", *p); // cause a segfault

For those unfamiliar with C programming, p is a pointer to a segment of memory. Setting it to NULL ensures that we try to read from a segment of memory to which the operating system does not allow us access, so of course dereferencing the NULL pointer through *p causes a segmentation fault. And that's what we want.

Of course, you can use Perl's CORE::dump( ) function, which causes a core dump, but you don't get the nice long trace provided by Debug::DumpCore, which on purpose calls a few other functions before causing a segfault.