PERL5282DELTA(1)

✨ NAME ✨

perl5282delta — what is new for perl v5.28.2 💖

okay bestie, you're holding the PERL5282DELTA(1) page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and it's giving "changelog but make it a glow-up". sit down, hydrate, let's go 🫶

---

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This doc spills the tea on the differences between the 5.28.1 release and the 5.28.2 release. periodt.

If you're upgrading from something even earlier, like 5.28.0, do yourself a favor and read perl5281delta first — that one covers the 5.28.0 → 5.28.1 pipeline. no skipping steps, bestie, we don't do that here 💅

---

💀 Incompatible Changes 💀

🔢 Any set of digits in the Common script are legal in a script run of another script

So there are actually several sets of digits living in the Common script. [0-9] is the one everyone knows and loves, obviously. But there's also [\x{FF10}-\x{FF19}] (that's FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO through FULLWIDTH DIGIT NINE, iconic), plus a bunch of sets used for mathematical notation, like the MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK DIGITs. ✨

Any of these sets should be able to show up in script runs of, say, Greek. But the old design lowkey overlooked all of them except the ASCII digits [0-9], so the design was straight-up flawed. That's been fixed now — which makes it both a bug fix and an incompatibility. two things can be true 💅

Heads up: all digits in a run still have to come from the same set of ten digits. no mixing, that's the rule.

[GH #16704] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16704>

---

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

🆙 Updated Modules and Pragmata

• Module::CoreList — upgraded from version 5.20181129_28 to 5.20190419. glow up 💖
• PerlIO::scalar — upgraded from version 0.29 to 0.30. slay ✨
• Storable — upgraded from version 3.08 to 3.08_01. obsessed 🎀

---

🖥️ Platform Support 🖥️

🌍 Platform-Specific Notes

🪟 Windows

The Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK build, with its early x64 compiler and tools, got accidentally broken back in Perl 5.27.9. oops 😭 That has now been fixed. we love a redemption arc 🫶

🍎 Mac OS X

Perl's build and testing process on Mac OS X for -Duseshrplib builds is now compatible with Mac OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP). ✨

SIP blocks binaries in /bin (and a few other places) from being passed the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. For our purposes, that means DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH can't be passed to the shell, which means that variable can't get passed to the testing or build process — so running perl couldn't find libperl.dylib. literally so rude of it 💀

To work around that, the initial build of the perl executable expects to find libperl.dylib in the build directory, and the library path is then adjusted during installation to point to the installed library. problem solved, main character energy 👑

[GH #15057] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15057>

---

🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

• If an in-place edit is still in progress during global destruction and the process exit code (as stored in $?) is zero, perl will now treat the in-place edit as successful, replacing the input file with any output produced.

This allows code like:

perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; last'

to replace the input file, while code like:

perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; die'

will not. Partly resolves [perl #133659]. fr fr.

[GH #16748] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16748>

• A regression in Perl 5.28 caused the following code to fail

close(STDIN); open(CHILD, "|wc -l")'

because the child's stdin would be closed on exec. This has now been fixed. 😌

• pack "u", "invalid uuencoding" now properly NUL terminates the zero-length SV produced. no cap.

[GH #16343] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16343>

• Failing to compile a format now aborts compilation. Like other errors in sub-parses this could leave the parser in a strange state, possibly crashing perl if compilation continued. scary actually 😭 fixed now.

[GH #16169] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16169>

• See "Any set of digits in the Common script are legal in a script run of another script". 👀 (yes we're circling back, it's that important)

---

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.28.2 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl 5.28.1 and contains approximately 2,500 lines of changes across 75 files from 13 authors. that's a whole lot of keyboard smashing 💖

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 1,200 lines of changes to 29 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.28.2:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andy Dougherty, David Mitchell, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Nicolas R., Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tina Müller, Tony Cook, Zak B. Elep.

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. we see you, we appreciate you 🫡💖

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish. ✨

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

---

🐞 Reporting Bugs 🐞

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at <https://rt.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 — like, actually tiny, bestie, not your whole codebase 🙈. 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 see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue. 🔐

---

💌 Give Thanks 💌

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks. go be sweet, it costs nothing 🥹💖

---

👀 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.

---

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this was perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03, and it's the PERL5282DELTA(1) manual page out. slay, stay hydrated, and may your builds never break 💅✨💖