How do I get ruby to print a full backtrace instead of a truncated one?

Question

Exception#backtrace has the entire stack in it:

def do_division_by_zero; 5 / 0; end
begin
  do_division_by_zero
rescue => exception
  puts exception.backtrace
  raise # always reraise
end

(Inspired by Peter Cooper's Ruby Inside blog)

You could also do this if you'd like a simple one-liner:

puts caller

This produces the error description and nice clean, indented stacktrace:

begin               
 # Some exception throwing code
rescue => e
  puts "Error during processing: #{$!}"
  puts "Backtrace:\n\t#{e.backtrace.join("\n\t")}"
end

IRB has a setting for this awful "feature", which you can customize.

Create a file called ~/.irbrc that includes the following line:

IRB.conf[:BACK_TRACE_LIMIT] = 100

This will allow you to see 100 stack frames in irb, at least. I haven't been able to find an equivalent setting for the non-interactive runtime.

Detailed information about IRB customization can be found in the Pickaxe book.