man > perl584delta(1)

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

NAME
       perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4

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

Incompatible Changes
       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.

Core Enhancements
   Malloc wrapping
       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.

   Unicode Character Database 4.0.1
       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1
       from 4.0.0.

   suidperl less insecure
       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".

   format
       In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See perlform

Modules and Pragmata
       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.

   Updated modules
       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

Performance Enhancements
       •   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

Utility Changes
       The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands for sourcing later, and
       can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class.

Installation and Configuration Improvements
       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 with the icon
       should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.

       Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.

Selected Bug Fixes
       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.

New or Changed Diagnostics
       "Carp"  and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have been made clearer, as
       described in "Incompatible Changes"

Changed Internals
       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.

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

Platform Specific Problems
       This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

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 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 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.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/

SEE ALSO
       The Changes file for 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                              PERL584DELTA(1)