PERL5142DELTA(1)

💖 perl5142delta — what's new for perl v5.14.2 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the tea on perl5142delta, part of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. it's a delta doc, which is fancy speak for "here's literally everything that changed." and babes, it's giving glow-up energy ✨

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so this page spills the differences between the 5.14.1 release and the 5.14.2 release. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 🫶

but if you're upgrading from something even older, like 5.14.0, you gotta go read perl5141delta first, because that one covers the glow-up from 5.14.0 to 5.14.1. no skipping steps, bestie, that's not the move. 💅

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✨ Core Enhancements ✨

No changes since 5.14.0.

like, zero. nothing. the core said "we're good actually." 💀

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🔒 Security 🔒

okay this is the serious part, so sit up straight, we're being responsible about it. 🎀

🛡️ File::Glob::bsd_glob() memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728)

so if you called File::Glob::bsd_glob with the unsupported flag GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC, it would cause an access violation / segfault. not cute. not the vibe. 😭

and here's the part that's highkey scary: a Perl program that accepts a flags value from an external source could expose itself to denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks. there are no known exploits in the wild, thank god, but still. 🫠

the problem has been corrected by explicitly disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to null. bug reported by Clément Lecigne. king behavior, honestly. 👑

🛡️ "Encode" decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)

a bug in Encode could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to overflow. this problem has been corrected. bug reported by Robert Zacek. slay for finding it, truly. 🌟

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🚫 Incompatible Changes 🚫

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.

so like, if you find one, that's not a feature, that's a bug, and they wanna hear about it. periodt. 💜

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📉 Deprecations 📉

There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0.

nothing got sent to the retirement home this round. iconic of them. 🌈

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📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

🆕 New Modules and Pragmata

None

(empty. vacant. the room is clean. 🧹)

⬆️ Updated Modules and Pragmata

• CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.9600 to version 1.9600_01.
  • CPAN::Distribution has been upgraded from version 1.9602 to 1.9602_01.
  • Backported bugfixes from CPAN version 1.9800. Ensures proper detection of configure_requires prerequisites from CPAN Meta files in the case where dynamic_config is true. [rt.cpan.org #68835]
  • Also ensures that configure_requires is only checked in META files, not MYMETA files, so protect against MYMETA generation that drops configure_requires.
• Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42 to 2.42_01.
  • See "Security".
• File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.12 to version 1.13.
  • See "Security".
• PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.11_01.
  • It fixes a problem with open my $fh, ">", \$scalar not working if $scalar is a copy-on-write scalar.

🗑️ Removed Modules and Pragmata

None

(nothing got yeeted. we love a peaceful release. 💖)

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🖥️ Platform Support 🖥️

🌱 New Platforms

None

👋 Discontinued Platforms

None

📝 Platform-Specific Notes

HP-UX PA-RISC/64 now supports gcc-4.x

A fix to correct the socketsize now makes the test suite pass on HP-UX PA-RISC for 64bitall builds.

the tests are passing, the vibes are immaculate, we're thriving. 🎉

Building on OS X 10.7 Lion and Xcode 4 works again

The build system has been updated to work with the build tools under Mac OS X 10.7.

it broke, they fixed it, we move. 🦋

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🐛 Bug Fixes 🐛

okay this is the part where I get emotionally invested, because these were all genuinely cursed. 😤

• In @INC filters (subroutines returned by subroutines in @INC), $_ used to misbehave: If returned from a subroutine, it would not be copied, but the variable itself would be returned; and freeing $_ (e.g., with undef *_) would cause perl to crash. This has been fixed [perl #91880].
• Perl 5.10.0 introduced some faulty logic that made U* in the middle of a pack template equivalent to U0 if the input string was empty. This has been fixed [perl #90160].
• caller no longer leaks memory when called from the DB package if @DB::args was assigned to after the first call to caller. Carp was triggering this bug [perl #97010].
• utf8::decode had a nasty bug that would modify copy-on-write scalars' string buffers in place (i.e., skipping the copy). This could result in hashes having two elements with the same key [perl #91834]. absolutely not, jail. 🚨
• Localising a tied variable used to make it read-only if it contained a copy-on-write string.
• Elements of restricted hashes (see the fields pragma) containing copy-on-write values couldn't be deleted, nor could such hashes be cleared (%hash = ()).
• Locking a hash element that is a glob copy no longer causes subsequent assignment to it to corrupt the glob.
• A panic involving the combination of the regular expression modifiers /aa introduced in 5.14.0 and the \b escape sequence has been fixed [perl #95964].

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⚠️ Known Problems ⚠️

This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are regressions from 5.12.0. so like, read this part, bestie, it matters. 🫶

• PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT is broken.
  • Since perl 5.14.0, building with -DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT hasn't been possible. This means that perl currently doesn't work on any platforms that require it to be built this way, including Symbian.
  • While PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT now works again on recent development versions of perl, it actually working on Symbian again hasn't been verified.
  • We'd be very interested in hearing from anyone working with Perl on Symbian.

if you are, in fact, a Symbian Perl person, please speak up, they are literally begging. 😭🙏

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👑 Acknowledgements 👑

Perl 5.14.2 represents approximately three months of development since Perl 5.14.1 and contains approximately 1200 lines of changes across 61 files from 9 authors. like, that's a whole group project that actually got finished. respect. 🫡

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 5.14.2:

Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, H.Merijn Brand, Karl Williamson, Nicholas Clark, Pau Amma and Ricardo Signes.

every single one of them, absolute icons. 💅✨

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📣 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://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ . 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@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

ngl, a giant wall of code with "it doesn't work" is not it. tiny but sufficient. that's the assignment. 🎀

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@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who 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.

so like, security stuff only for that address, and core only, not random CPAN modules. don't be that person. 🙈

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👀 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.

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 this was perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03, and it's the PERL5142DELTA(1) manual page. go forth, upgrade responsibly, and remember: read the delta docs before you ship. 💖✨🦋