{
    "mode": "man",
    "parameter": "perl585delta",
    "section": "1",
    "url": "https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/perl585delta/1/json",
    "generated": "2026-08-21T20:13:24Z",
    "sections": {
        "NAME": {
            "content": "perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "DESCRIPTION": {
            "content": "This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Incompatible Changes": {
            "content": "There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Core Enhancements": {
            "content": "Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the intersection of two\nUnicode character classes. You can also now refer to user-defined character classes from\nwithin other user defined character classes.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Modules and Pragmata": {
            "content": "•   Carp  improved  to  work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now be anomaly\nfree - it will always print out line number information.\n\n•   CGI upgraded to version 3.05\n\n•   charnames now avoids clobbering $\n\n•   Digest upgraded to version 1.08\n\n•   Encode upgraded to version 2.01\n\n•   FileCache upgraded to version 1.04\n\n•   libnet upgraded to version 1.19\n\n•   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28\n\n•   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13\n\n•   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57\n\n•   Safe now works properly with Carp\n\n•   Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14\n\n•   Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its  historical  partial  auto-quoting  of\ncommand arguments can now be disabled.\n\n•   Test upgraded to version 1.25\n\n•   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42\n\n•   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10\n\n•   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40\n\n•   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Utility Changes": {
            "content": "",
            "subsections": [
                {
                    "name": "Perl's debugger",
                    "content": "The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last\ncommand from a saved command history.\n"
                },
                {
                    "name": "h2ph",
                    "content": "h2ph  is  now  able  to understand a very limited set of C inline functions -- basically, the\ninline functions that look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with some of the\nheaders of the newest versions of the glibc. The standard warning  still  applies;  to  quote\nh2ph's documentation, you may need to dicker with the files produced.\n"
                }
            ]
        },
        "Installation and Configuration Improvements": {
            "content": "Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Selected Bug Fixes": {
            "content": "•   The  in-place  sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, in code such\nas\n\n@a = sort ($b, @a)\n\nthe result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.\n\n•   The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced  in  5.8.4  could  give  spurious\nwarnings. This has been fixed.\n\n•   Perl  should  now  correctly  detect  and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16 scripts of\neither endianness.\n\n•   Creating a new thread when weak  references  exist  was  buggy,  and  would  often  cause\nwarnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.\n\n•   Several  obscure  bugs  involving  manipulating  Unicode  strings with \"substr\" have been\nfixed.\n\n•   Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it did not  have\npermission  to  open it would return immediately, leading to unexpected truncation of the\nlist of results. This has been  fixed,  to  be  consistent  with  Unix  shells'  globbing\nbehaviour.\n\n•   Thread  creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused by a poor\nhashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now been fixed.\n\n•   The internals of the  ithreads  implementation  were  not  checking  if  OS-level  thread\ncreation  had  failed.  threads->create() now returns \"undef\" in if thread creation fails\ninstead of crashing perl.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "New or Changed Diagnostics": {
            "content": "•   Perl -V has several improvements\n\n•   correctly outputs local patch names that contain  embedded  code  snippets  or  other\ncharacters that used to confuse it.\n\n•   arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.\n\n•   a  trailing  colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing embedding of\nqueries into shell commands.\n\n•   a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response,  allowing  mapping  to  any\nname.\n\n•   When  perl  fails  to  find the specified script, it now outputs a second line suggesting\nthat the user use the \"-S\" flag:\n\n$ perl5.8.5 missing.pl\nCan't open perl script \"missing.pl\": No such file or directory.\nUse -S to search $PATH for it.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Changed Internals": {
            "content": "The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression  engine  are  now  built  at\nbuild  time  from  the  supplied  Unicode  consortium  data  files,  instead of being shipped\nprebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect  is\nthat the layout of files inside lib/unicore has changed.\n",
            "subsections": []
        },
        "Known Problems": {
            "content": "The  regression  test  t/uni/class.t  is now performing considerably more tests, and can take\nseveral minutes to run even on a fast machine.\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                              PERL585DELTA(1)",
            "subsections": []
        }
    },
    "summary": "perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5",
    "flags": [],
    "examples": [],
    "see_also": []
}