{ "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "# perl584delta (man)\n\n## NAME\n\nperl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4\n\n## DESCRIPTION\n\nThis document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the 5.8.4 release.\n\n## Sections\n\n- **NAME**\n- **DESCRIPTION**\n- **Incompatible Changes**\n- **Core Enhancements** (4 subsections)\n- **Modules and Pragmata** (1 subsections)\n- **Performance Enhancements**\n- **Utility Changes**\n- **Installation and Configuration Improvements**\n- **Selected Bug Fixes**\n- **New or Changed Diagnostics**\n- **Changed Internals**\n- **Future Directions**\n- **Platform Specific Problems**\n- **Reporting Bugs**\n- **SEE ALSO**\n\nUse structuredContent.sections for detailed options, examples, and full documentation.\n" } ], "structuredContent": { "command": "perl584delta", "section": "", "mode": "man", "summary": "perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4", "synopsis": null, "tldr_summary": null, "tldr_examples": [], "tldr_source": null, "flags": [], "examples": [], "see_also": [], "section_outline": [ { "name": "NAME", "lines": 2, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "DESCRIPTION", "lines": 2, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Incompatible Changes", "lines": 13, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Core Enhancements", "lines": 1, "subsections": [ { "name": "Malloc wrapping", "lines": 7 }, { "name": "Unicode Character Database 4.0.1", "lines": 3 }, { "name": "suidperl less insecure", "lines": 11 }, { "name": "format", "lines": 2 } ] }, { "name": "Modules and Pragmata", "lines": 5, "subsections": [ { "name": "Updated modules", "lines": 42 } ] }, { "name": "Performance Enhancements", "lines": 12, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Utility Changes", "lines": 3, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Installation and Configuration Improvements", "lines": 12, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Selected Bug Fixes", "lines": 16, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "New or Changed Diagnostics", "lines": 3, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Changed Internals", "lines": 4, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Future Directions", "lines": 3, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Platform Specific Problems", "lines": 2, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "Reporting Bugs", "lines": 9, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "SEE ALSO", "lines": 9, "subsections": [] } ], "sections": { "NAME": { "content": "perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4\n", "subsections": [] }, "DESCRIPTION": { "content": "This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the 5.8.4 release.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Incompatible Changes": { "content": "Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously erroneous\nbehaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible changes :-) You are advised to perform\nsufficient acceptance testing on this release to satisfy yourself that this does not affect\nyou, before putting this release into production.\n\nThe diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after the comma\nbetween arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such as web browsers to wrap it, but\nmight confuse any automatic tools which perform detailed parsing of Carp output.\n\nThe internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characters such as newline\nand backspace are output in \"\\x\" notation, rather than octal. This might just confuse non-\nrobust tools which parse the output of modules such as Devel::Peek.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Core Enhancements": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "Malloc wrapping", "content": "Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks of memory.\nPreviously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around during size calculations\ncausing a misallocation, which would crash perl, and could theoretically be used for \"stack\nsmashing\" attacks. The wrapping defaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works\n(most AIX configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD,\nSolaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other platforms.\n" }, { "name": "Unicode Character Database 4.0.1", "content": "The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1\nfrom 4.0.0.\n" }, { "name": "suidperl less insecure", "content": "Paul Szabo has analysed and patched \"suidperl\" to remove existing known insecurities.\nCurrently there are no known holes in \"suidperl\", but previous experience shows that we\ncannot be confident that these were the last. You may no longer invoke the set uid perl\ndirectly, so to preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl\nthe only set uid binary is now \"sperl5.8.\"n (\"sperl5.8.4\" for this release). \"suidperl\" is\ninstalled as a hard link to \"perl\"; both \"suidperl\" and \"perl\" will invoke \"sperl5.8.4\"\nautomatically the set uid binary, so this change should be completely transparent.\n\nFor new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use dedicated, single\npurpose security tools such as \"sudo\" in preference to \"suidperl\".\n" }, { "name": "format", "content": "In addition to bug fixes, \"format\"'s features have been enhanced. See perlform\n" } ] }, "Modules and Pragmata": { "content": "The (mis)use of \"/tmp\" in core modules and documentation has been tidied up. Some modules\navailable both within the perl core and independently from CPAN (\"dual-life modules\") have\nnot yet had these changes applied; the changes will be integrated into future stable perl\nreleases as the modules are updated on CPAN.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Updated modules", "content": "Attribute::Handlers\nB\nBenchmark\nCGI\nCarp\nCwd\nExporter\nFile::Find\nIO\nIPC::Open3\nLocal::Maketext\nMath::BigFloat\nMath::BigInt\nMath::BigRat\nMIME::Base64\nODBMFile\nPOSIX\nShell\nSocket\nThere is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.\n\nStorable\nSwitch\nSynced with its CPAN version 2.10\n\nSys::Syslog\nsyslog() can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities, in addition to\nstrings.\n\nTerm::ANSIColor\nTime::HiRes\nUnicode::UCD\nWin32\nWin32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl\n\nbase\nopen\nthreads\nDetached threads are now also supported on Windows.\n\nutf8\n" } ] }, "Performance Enhancements": { "content": "• Accelerated Unicode case mappings (\"/i\", \"lc\", \"uc\", etc).\n\n• In place sort optimised (eg \"@a = sort @a\")\n\n• Unnecessary assignment optimised away in\n\nmy $s = undef;\nmy @a = ();\nmy %h = ();\n\n• Optimised \"map\" in scalar context\n", "subsections": [] }, "Utility Changes": { "content": "The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands for sourcing later, and\ncan display the parent inheritance tree of a given class.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Installation and Configuration Improvements": { "content": "The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements made. On Windows\nBorland's C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or USELARGEFILES enabled.\n\n\"perl.exe\" on Windows now has a \"Camel\" logo icon. The use of a camel with the topic of Perl\nis a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is used with their permission (ie\ndistribution of the source, compiling a Windows executable from it, and using that executable\nlocally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other than a perl executable's icon is\nspecifically not covered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries with the icon\nshould check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.\n\nPerl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Selected Bug Fixes": { "content": "More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how \"chomp\", \"chop\", \"send\", and \"syswrite\" and interact\nwith utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctly when \"use bytes;\" is in scope.\n\nPragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps. Code such as\n\nmy $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };\n\nwill now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is and has always referred to\n$::x)\n\nThe \"const in void context\" warning has been suppressed for a constant in an optimised-away\nboolean expression such as \"5 || print;\"\n\n\"perl -i\" could fchmod(stdin) by mistake. This is serious if stdin is attached to a terminal,\nand perl is running as root. Now fixed.\n", "subsections": [] }, "New or Changed Diagnostics": { "content": "\"Carp\" and the internal diagnostic routines used by \"Devel::Peek\" have been made clearer, as\ndescribed in \"Incompatible Changes\"\n", "subsections": [] }, "Changed Internals": { "content": "Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and their place holders\nare now allocated and deleted at slightly different times, but this should not be visible to\nuser code.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Future Directions": { "content": "Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June 2004, with release\nby mid July.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Platform Specific Problems": { "content": "This release is known not to build on Windows 95.\n", "subsections": [] }, "Reporting Bugs": { "content": "If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the\ncomp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may\nalso be information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.\n\nIf you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your\nrelease. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report,\nalong with the output of \"perl -V\", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by\nthe Perl porting team. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/\n", "subsections": [] }, "SEE ALSO": { "content": "The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.\n\nThe INSTALL file for how to build Perl.\n\nThe README file for general stuff.\n\nThe Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.\n\nperl v5.38.2 2026-06-12 PERL584DELTA(1)", "subsections": [] } } } }