PERL5144DELTA(1)

💖 NAME 💖

perl5144delta — bestie, it's the tea on what's new for perl v5.14.4 ✨

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Okay so this doc spills the tea on all the differences between the 5.14.3 release and the 5.14.4 release. Slay.

If you're upgrading from something way older, like 5.12.0, no worries — go read perl5140delta first, bestie, because that one explains the glow-up from 5.12.0 to 5.14.0. 💅

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✨ Core Enhancements ✨

No changes since 5.14.0. Literally zero. It's giving "if it ain't broke." 🎀

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🛡️ Security 🛡️

So this release is packing one major, and medium, and a number of minor security fixes. The little ones are mostly in there so the test suite passes cleanly with the clang compiler's address sanitizer facility. Cute, functional, iconic. 💖

💀 CVE-2013-1667: memory exhaustion with arbitrary hash keys

Okay so imagine a carefully crafted set of hash keys — like, say, the arguments on a URL — and it can make a hash absolutely DEVOUR a huge amount of memory and CPU, which could possibly get you a Denial-of-Service. Not the vibe. 😭

This problem has been fixed. 🫶

💀 memory leak in Encode

The UTF-8 encoding implementation in Encode.xs had a memory leak, which has been fixed. No more drip, periodt. 💅

💀 [perl #111594] Socket::unpack_sockaddr_un heap-buffer-overflow

A read buffer overflow could happen when copying sockaddr buffers. Fairly harmless, ngl.

This problem has been fixed. ✨

💀 [perl #111586] SDBM_File: fix off-by-one access to global ".dir"

An extra byte was being copied for some string literals. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🎀

💀 off-by-two error in List::Util

A string literal was being used that included two bytes beyond the end of the string. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🦋

💀 [perl #115994] fix segv in regcomp.c:S_join_exact()

Under debugging builds, while marking optimised-out regex nodes as type OPTIMIZED, it could treat blocks of exact text as if they were nodes, and thus SEGV. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 😭

💀 [perl #115992] PL_eval_start use-after-free

The statement local $[;, when preceded by an eval, and when not part of an assignment, could crash. Fairly harmless.

This problem has been fixed. 🙈

💀 wrap-around with IO on long strings

Reading or writing strings greater than 2**31 bytes in size could segfault due to integer wraparound. The math said no but the code said yes. 💀

This problem has been fixed. 🌈

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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, tell us bestie, we want the receipts. 🧚

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📉 Deprecations 📉

There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0. Nothing got cancelled. 👑

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📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

🆕 New Modules and Pragmata

None

⬆️ Updated Modules and Pragmata

The following modules have just the minor code fixes as listed above in Security (version numbers have not changed):

• Socket
• SDBM_File
• List::Util

Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42_01 to version 2.42_02. Glow-up. ✨

Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.49_06 to add data for this release. 💖

🗑️ Removed Modules and Pragmata

None.

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📚 Documentation 📚

🆕 New Documentation

None.

✏️ Changes to Existing Documentation

None.

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🩺 Diagnostics 🩺

No new or changed diagnostics. The doctor said nothing's wrong. 💅

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🔧 Utility Changes 🔧

None

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⚙️ Configuration and Compilation ⚙️

No changes. 😌

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💻 Platform Support 💻

🆕 New Platforms

None.

👋 Discontinued Platforms

None.

📍 Platform-Specific Notes

• VMS — 5.14.3 failed to compile on VMS due to incomplete application of a patch series that allowed userelocatableinc and usesitecustomize to be used simultaneously. Other platforms were not affected and the problem has now been corrected. It was literally just a VMS thing, bestie, everyone else was fine. 🫶

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🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

• In Perl 5.14.0, $tainted ~~ @array stopped working properly. Sometimes it would erroneously fail (when $tainted contained a string that occurs in the array after the first element) or erroneously succeed (when undef occurred after the first element) [perl #93590]. The vibes were off and now they're back. 💜

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❓ Known Problems ❓

None. We're thriving. 🌸

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🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.14.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.14.3 and contains approximately 1,700 lines of changes across 49 files from 12 authors. That's a whole era of work, no cap. 🔥

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 5.14.4:

Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christian Hansen, Craig A. Berry, Dave Rolsky, David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Yves Orton.

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. You're seen and you're loved. 💖

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

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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 — yes, the tiny little repro, we need it. 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. 💌

⚠️ 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. 🙏 Keep it secret, keep it safe, bestie.

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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 the manual name is PERL5144DELTA(1) — go forth and upgrade, you ate 🎀✨