<p>Does Ruby have a stepwise debugger, similar to Perl's "perl -d"?</p>

The
ruby-debug
(for ruby 1.8),
debugger
(for ruby 1.9),
byebug
(for ruby 2.0) and also the
trepanning
series all have an
```
-x
```
or
```
--trace
```
option. Inside the debuggers, the command
```
set linetrace
```
will turn on or off line tracing. Here is
the manual for ruby-debug
The original answer has been revised because the link to the datanoise article, alas, no longer works. Also added are the successors to ruby-debug