PERL584DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL584DELTA(1)

PERL584DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL584DELTA(1) #

PERL584DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL584DELTA(1)

NNAAMMEE #

 perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4

DDEESSCCRRIIPPTTIIOONN #

 This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the
 5.8.4 release.

IInnccoommppaattiibbllee CChhaannggeess Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously erroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible changes :-) You are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on this release to satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting this release into production.

 The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space
 after the comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools
 such as web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools
 which perform detailed parsing of Carp output.

 The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable
 characters such as newline and backspace are output in "\x" notation,
 rather than octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse
 the output of modules such as Devel::Peek.

CCoorree EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss MMaalllloocc wwrraappppiinngg Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks of memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around during size calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash perl, and could theoretically be used for “stack smashing” attacks. The wrapping defaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIX configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other platforms.

UUnniiccooddee CChhaarraacctteerr DDaattaabbaassee 44..00..11 The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.

ssuuiiddppeerrll lleessss iinnsseeccuurree Paul Szabo has analysed and patched “suidperl” to remove existing known insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in “suidperl”, but previous experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You may no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now “sperl5.8."_n (“sperl5.8.4” for this release). “suidperl” is installed as a hard link to “perl”; both “suidperl” and “perl” will invoke “sperl5.8.4” automatically the set uid binary, so this change should be completely transparent.

 For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use
 dedicated, single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in preference to
 "suidperl".

ffoorrmmaatt In addition to bug fixes, “format”’s features have been enhanced. See perlform

MMoodduulleess aanndd PPrraaggmmaattaa The (mis)use of “/tmp” in core modules and documentation has been tidied up. Some modules available both within the perl core and independently from CPAN (“dual-life modules”) have not yet had these changes applied; the changes will be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules are updated on CPAN.

UUppddaatteedd mmoodduulleess Attribute::Handlers

B #

 Benchmark

CGI #

 Carp
 Cwd
 Exporter
 File::Find

IO #

 IPC::Open3
 Local::Maketext
 Math::BigFloat
 Math::BigInt
 Math::BigRat
 MIME::Base64
 ODBM_File

POSIX #

 Shell
 Socket
     There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.

 Storable
 Switch
     Synced with its CPAN version 2.10

 Sys::Syslog
     "syslog()" can now use numeric constants for facility names and
     priorities, in addition to strings.

 Term::ANSIColor
 Time::HiRes
 Unicode::UCD
 Win32
     Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl

 base
 open
 threads
     Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.

 utf8

PPeerrffoorrmmaannccee EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss • Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i”, “lc”, “uc”, etc).

 •   In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a")

 •   Unnecessary assignment optimised away in

       my $s = undef;
       my @a = ();
       my %h = ();

 •   Optimised "map" in scalar context

UUttiilliittyy CChhaannggeess The Perl debugger (_l_i_b_/_p_e_r_l_5_d_b_._p_l) can now save all debugger commands for sourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class.

IInnssttaallllaattiioonn aanndd CCoonnffiigguurraattiioonn IImmpprroovveemmeennttss The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements made. On Windows Borland’s C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or USE_LARGE_FILES enabled.

 "perl.exe" on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel
 with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc.,
 and is used with their permission (ie distribution of the source,
 compiling a Windows executable from it, and using that executable
 locally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other than a perl
 executable's icon is specifically not covered, and anyone wishing to
 redistribute perl binaries _w_i_t_h the icon should check directly with
 O'Reilly beforehand.

 Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.

SSeelleecctteedd BBuugg FFiixxeess More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how “chomp”, “chop”, “send”, and “syswrite” and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctly when “use bytes;” is in scope.

 Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in
 regexps.  Code such as

    my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };

 will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is and has
 always referred to $::x)

 The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in
 an optimised-away boolean expression such as "5 || print;"

 "perl -i" could "fchmod(stdin)" by mistake. This is serious if stdin is
 attached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed.

NNeeww oorr CChhaannggeedd DDiiaaggnnoossttiiccss “Carp” and the internal diagnostic routines used by “Devel::Peek” have been made clearer, as described in “Incompatible Changes”

CChhaannggeedd IInntteerrnnaallss Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and their place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different times, but this should not be visible to user code.

FFuuttuurree DDiirreeccttiioonnss Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June 2004, with release by mid July.

PPllaattffoorrmm SSppeecciiffiicc PPrroobblleemmss This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

RReeppoorrttiinngg BBuuggss If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.

 If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the ppeerrllbbuugg program
 included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but
 sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output of "perl
 -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl
 porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
 http://bugs.perl.org/

SSEEEE AALLSSOO #

 The _C_h_a_n_g_e_s file for exhaustive details on what changed.

 The _I_N_S_T_A_L_L file for how to build Perl.

 The _R_E_A_D_M_E file for general stuff.

 The _A_r_t_i_s_t_i_c and _C_o_p_y_i_n_g files for copyright information.

perl v5.36.3 2004-08-09 PERL584DELTA(1)