diff --git a/src/build.pl b/src/build.pl
index aa5fc8f..7316d56 100644
--- a/src/build.pl
+++ b/src/build.pl
@@ -5,6 +5,25 @@
 use Cwd;
 $/ = undef;
 
+# Set up shell
+my $verbose = 0;
+$verbose = 1 if $ENV{VERBOSE} =~ /^yes$/i;
+
+if ($verbose) {
+    # we implement VERBOSE by restarting in the debugger and having it print each line
+    unless (defined &DB::DB) {
+        # sadly Devel::Trace is not a standard package so we test for it here
+        eval {
+            require Devel::Trace;
+        };
+        unless ($@) {
+            exit system($^X, "-d:Trace", $0,  @ARGV);
+        } else {
+            message("Could not 'import Devel::Trace' required for VERBOSE=yes. Consider installing it from CPAN https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trace or using your package manager (possibly in the libdevel-trace-perl package).");
+        }
+    }
+}
+
 # Set locations
 my $THORN = "MPI";
 my $NAME = "openmpi-1.10.7";
diff --git a/src/detect.pl b/src/detect.pl
index 84cd56c..0a6d736 100644
--- a/src/detect.pl
+++ b/src/detect.pl
@@ -13,6 +13,21 @@
 my $verbose = 0;
 $verbose = 1 if $ENV{VERBOSE} =~ /^yes$/i;
 
+if ($verbose) {
+    # we implement VERBOSE by restarting in the debugger and having it print each line
+    unless (defined &DB::DB) {
+        # sadly Devel::Trace is not a standard package so we test for it here
+        eval {
+            require Devel::Trace;
+        };
+        unless ($@) {
+            exit system($^X, "-d:Trace", $0,  @ARGV);
+        } else {
+            message("Could not 'import Devel::Trace' required for VERBOSE=yes. Consider installing it from CPAN https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trace or using your package manager (possibly in the libdevel-trace-perl package).");
+        }
+    }
+}
+
 ################################################################################
 # Check for old mechanism
 ################################################################################