Perl Test::More trick

Recently I was working on a rather large Perl module and writing unit tests for it. I had some tests already completely done and trying to debug another chunk of code & tests. It was hard with debugging on to see what was going on. I just wanted to see one set of tests and nothing from the other sets. At first I commented out the blocks of code that ran the tests I didn't care about. Then I realized there was an easier way.

Say you have a test that starts with something like:

sub my_batch_of_tests : Test(6) {

Easy way to disable these: turn the above line to something like

sub my_batch_of_tests { # : Test(6)

When you do run_tests() on this test module, it won't run this block of tests because this function will no longer register as a test.


NOTE: this tip assumes you are using Test::More and Test::Class and have it set up so all your tests are in a module and you have a script that loads that module and does ->run_tests on the module with your tests.