man > perl5202delta(1)

PERL5202DELTA(1)                  Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL5202DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.20.1 release and the 5.20.2 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.0, first read perl5201delta, which
       describes differences between 5.20.0 and 5.20.1.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.1.  If any exist, they are bugs,
       and we request that you submit a report.  See "Reporting Bugs" below.

Modules and Pragmata
   Updated Modules and Pragmata
       •   attributes has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.

           The    usage    of    "memEQs"   in   the   XS   has   been   corrected.    [GH   #14072]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14072>

       •   Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.151 to 2.151_01.

           Fixes CVE-2014-4330 by adding a configuration variable/option  to  limit  recursion  when
           dumping deep data structures.

       •   Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_03 to 1.20_05.

           Warnings when building the XS on Windows with the Visual C++ compiler are now avoided.

       •   feature has been upgraded from version 1.36 to 1.36_01.

           The "postderef" feature has now been documented.  This feature was actually added in Perl
           5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the feature documentation until now.

       •   IO::Socket has been upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.38.

           Document     the    limitations    of    the    connected()    method.     [GH    #14199]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14199>

       •   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.020001 to 5.20150214.

           The list of Perl versions covered has been updated.

       •   PathTools has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.48_01.

           A warning from the gcc compiler is now avoided when building the XS.

       •   PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.18_01.

           Reading from a position well past the end of the scalar  now  correctly  returns  end  of
           file.  [GH #14342] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14342>

           Seeking to a negative position still fails, but no longer leaves the file position set to
           a negation location.

           eof()  on  a  "PerlIO::scalar" handle now properly returns true when the file position is
           past the 2GB mark on 32-bit systems.

       •   Storable has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.49_01.

           Minor grammatical change to the documentation only.

       •   VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.05_01.

           Minor formatting change to the documentation only.

       •   VMS::Stdio has been upgraded from version 2.4 to 2.41.

           Minor formatting change to the documentation only.

Documentation
   New Documentation
       perlunicook

       This document, by Tom Christiansen, provides examples of handling Unicode in Perl.

   Changes to Existing Documentation
       perlexperiment

       •   Added reference to subroutine signatures.  This feature was actually added in Perl 5.20.0
           but was accidentally omitted from the experimental feature documentation until now.

       perlpolicy

       •   The process whereby features may graduate from experimental status has now been  formally
           documented.

       perlsyn

       •   An  ambiguity  in  the  documentation  of the ellipsis statement has been corrected.  [GH
           #14054] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14054>

Diagnostics
       The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic  output,  including  warnings
       and fatal error messages.  For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.

   Changes to Existing Diagnostics
       •   Bad  symbol  for scalar is now documented.  This error is not new, but was not previously
           documented here.

       •   Missing right brace on \N{} is now documented.  This  error  is  not  new,  but  was  not
           previously documented here.

Testing
       •   The   test   script   re/rt122747.t   has   been   added   to  verify  that  [GH  #14081]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081> remains fixed.

Platform Support
   Regained Platforms
       IRIX and Tru64 platforms are working again.  (Some "make test" failures remain.)

Selected Bug Fixes
       •   AIX   now    sets    the    length    in    "getsockopt"    correctly.     [GH    #13484]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/13484>,                [cpan                #91183]
           <https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=91183>,             [cpan             #85570]
           <https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=85570>

       •   In Perl 5.20.0, $^N accidentally had the internal UTF8 flag turned off if accessed from a
           code  block  within  a regular expression, effectively UTF8-encoding the value.  This has
           been fixed.  [GH #14211] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14211>

       •   Various cases where the name of a sub is used  (autoload,  overloading,  error  messages)
           used to crash for lexical subs, but have been fixed.

       •   An  assertion  failure  when  parsing  "sort" with debugging enabled has been fixed.  [GH
           #14087] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14087>

       •   Loading UTF8 tables during a regular expression  match  could  cause  assertion  failures
           under  debugging builds if the previous match used the very same regular expression.  [GH
           #14081] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081>

       •   Due to a mistake in the string-copying logic, copying the value of a state variable could
           instead steal the value and undefine the variable.  This bug, introduced  in  Perl  5.20,
           would  happen  mostly  for  long  strings  (1250 chars or more), but could happen for any
           strings    under     builds     with     copy-on-write     disabled.      [GH     #14175]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14175>

       •   Fixed  a  bug  that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop during compilation.  [GH
           #14165] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14165>

       •   On Win32, restoring in a child pseudo-process a variable that was local()ed in  a  parent
           pseudo-process  before  the  "fork"  happened caused memory corruption and a crash in the
           child     pseudo-process     (and     therefore     OS     process).      [GH      #8641]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/8641>

       •   Tainted  constants  evaluated  at  compile  time  no longer cause unrelated statements to
           become tainted.  [GH #14059] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14059>

       •   Calling "write" on a format with a "^**" field could produce  a  panic  in  sv_chop()  if
           there  were  insufficient  arguments or if the variable used to fill the field was empty.
           [GH #14255] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14255>

       •   In Perl 5.20.0, "sort CORE::fake" where 'fake' is anything other than a  keyword  started
           chopping  of  the  last  6  characters  and  treating the result as a sort sub name.  The
           previous behaviour of treating "CORE::fake" as a sort sub name has  been  restored.   [GH
           #14323] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14323>

       •   A  bug  in regular expression patterns that could lead to segfaults and other crashes has
           been fixed.  This occurred only in patterns compiled with "/i", while taking into account
           the current POSIX locale (this usually means they have to be compiled within the scope of
           "use locale"), and there must be a string of at least 128  consecutive  bytes  to  match.
           [GH #14389] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14389>

       •   "qr/@array(?{block})/"  no  longer  dies  with  "Bizarre  copy  of  ARRAY".   [GH #14292]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14292>

       •   "gmtime"    no    longer    crashes    with    not-a-number    values.     [GH    #14365]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14365>

       •   Certain  syntax errors in substitutions, such as "s/${<>{})//", would crash, and had done
           so since Perl 5.10.  (In some cases the crash did not start happening until  Perl  5.16.)
           The      crash      has,      of      course,      been      fixed.       [GH     #14391]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14391>

       •   A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl  5.20.1,  has  been  fixed.
           [GH #14236] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14236>

       •   "formline("@...",  "a");" would crash.  The "FF_CHECKNL" case in pp_formline() didn't set
           the pointer used to mark the chop position, which led to the "FF_MORE" case crashing with
           a     segmentation     fault.      This     has     been     fixed.      [GH      #14388]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14388>                  [GH                 #14425]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14425>

       •   A possible buffer overrun and  crash  when  parsing  a  literal  pattern  during  regular
           expression        compilation        has       been       fixed.        [GH       #14416]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14416>

Known Problems
       •   It is a known bug that lexical subroutines cannot be used as the  "SUBNAME"  argument  to
           "sort".  This will be fixed in a future version of Perl.

Errata From Previous Releases
       •   A  regression  has been fixed that was introduced in Perl 5.20.0 (fixed in Perl 5.20.1 as
           well as here) in which a UTF-8 encoded regular expression pattern that contains a  single
           ASCII   lowercase   letter  does  not  match  its  uppercase  counterpart.   [GH  #14051]
           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14051>

Acknowledgements
       Perl 5.20.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.20.1  and  contains
       approximately 6,300 lines of changes across 170 files from 34 authors.

       Excluding  auto-generated  files,  documentation  and release tools, there were approximately
       1,900 lines of changes to 80 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of  users  and
       developers.   The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became
       Perl 5.20.2:

       Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andreas Voegele, Andy Dougherty, Anthony Heading, Aristotle  Pagaltzis,
       Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, Doug Bell, Ed J, Father Chrysostomos,
       Glenn  D. Golden, H.Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jim
       Cromie, Karen Etheridge,  Karl  Williamson,  kmx,  Matthew  Horsfall,  Max  Maischein,  Peter
       Martini,  Rafael  Garcia-Suarez,  Ricardo  Signes, Shlomi Fish, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller,
       Steve Hay, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Tony Cook, Yves Orton, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.

       The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated  from  version
       control history.  In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated)
       contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

       Many  of  the  changes  included  in  this version originated in the CPAN modules included in
       Perl's core.  We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

       For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,  please  see  the  AUTHORS
       file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs
       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 https://rt.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 perlbug 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 AT perl.org to  be  analysed  by
       the Perl porting team.

       If  the  bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send
       to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it  to  perl5-security-report AT perl.org.
       This  points  to  a  closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
       committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure  out  a  resolution,
       and  help  co-ordinate  the  release  of  patches  to  mitigate or fix the problem across all
       platforms on which Perl is supported.  Please only use this address for  security  issues  in
       the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.

SEE ALSO
       The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.

       The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

       The README file for general stuff.

       The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

perl v5.38.2                                 2026-06-12                             PERL5202DELTA(1)
perl5202delta(1)
NAME DESCRIPTION Incompatible Changes Modules and Pragmata
Updated Modules and Pragmata
Documentation
New Documentation Changes to Existing Documentation
Diagnostics
Changes to Existing Diagnostics
Testing Platform Support
Regained Platforms
Selected Bug Fixes Known Problems Errata From Previous Releases Acknowledgements Reporting Bugs SEE ALSO

Generated by phpman v4.9.26-5-g7740029 · Markdown · JSON · MCP Author: Che Dong Under GNU General Public License
2026-08-22 09:06 @216.73.216.206
CrawledBy Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!Valid CSS!

^_top_^