The Test::Valgrind::* API lets you run Perl code through the memcheck tool of
the valgrind memory debugger, to test for memory errors and leaks. The
Test::Valgrind module itself is a front-end to this API. If they aren't
available yet, it will first generate suppressions for the current perl
interpreter and store them in the portable flavor of
~/.perl/Test-Valgrind/suppressions/$VERSION. The actual run will then take
place, and tests will be passed or failed according to the result of the
analysis.
The complete API is much more versatile than this. By declaring an appropriate
Test::Valgrind::Command class, you can run any executable (that is, not only
Perl scripts) under valgrind, generate the corresponding suppressions
on-the-fly and convert the analysis result to TAP output so that it can be
incorporated into your project's test suite. If you're not interested in
producing TAP, you can output the results in whatever format you like (for
example HTML pages) by defining your own Test::Valgrind::Action class.
Paul Howarth
Fedora Release Engineering