PERL5382DELTA(1)

💖 perl5382delta — what is new for perl v5.38.2 💖

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because this is the Perl Programmers Reference Guide page for perl5382delta and it's basically the patch-notes glow-up of the century. no cap. ✨

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So this doc spills the tea on the differences between the 5.38.0 release and the 5.38.2 release. 💅

lowkey important: this document ignores Perl 5.38.1, which was a broken release that only existed for like a couple of days. we do not speak of her. 🙈

If you're upgrading from something earlier, like 5.37.0, you gotta read perl5380delta first, because that one describes the differences between 5.37.0 and 5.38.0. reading order matters, bestie. 🎀

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🔒 Security 🔒

This release fixes the following security issues. and when i say fixes, i mean it ate. 💀

🚨 CVE-2023-47038 — Write past buffer end via illegal user-defined Unicode property

This vulnerability was reported directly to the Perl security team by Nathan Mills "the.true.nathan.mills@gmail.com". thank you king 🫶

A crafted regular expression, when compiled by perl 5.30.0 through 5.38.0, can cause a one-byte attacker controlled buffer overflow in a heap allocated buffer. that's literally so bad, do NOT play with this. 😭

🚨 CVE-2023-47039 — Perl for Windows binary hijacking vulnerability

This vulnerability was reported to the Intel Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) by GitHub user ycdxsb <https://github.com/ycdxsb/WindowsPrivilegeEscalation>. PSIRT then reported it to the Perl security team. chain of custody, slay. ✨

So here's the vibe: Perl for Windows relies on the system path environment variable to find the shell ("cmd.exe"). When running an executable which uses Windows Perl interpreter, Perl attempts to find and execute "cmd.exe" within the operating system. However, due to path search order issues, Perl initially looks for cmd.exe in the current working directory. 🫠

An attacker with limited privileges can exploit this behavior by placing "cmd.exe" in locations with weak permissions, such as "C:\ProgramData". By doing so, when an administrator attempts to use this executable from these compromised locations, arbitrary code can be executed. yes this is as scary as it sounds, protect your C:\ProgramData like it's your notes app. 💀

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🏆 Acknowledgements 🏆

Perl 5.38.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.38.0 and contains approximately 6,100 lines of changes across 34 files from 4 authors. the math is mathing. 💅

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 1,300 lines of changes to 9 .pm, .t, .c and .h files. look at those file extensions go. 👑

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. the way that perl has been THAT girl for four decades… iconic. 🌈

The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.38.2:

• Karl Williamson
• Paul Evans
• Steve Hay
• Tony Cook

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. y'all are seen and loved, fr fr. 🫶

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. CPAN besties stay winning. 💖

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 perl bug database at <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>. There may also be information at <http://www.perl.org/>, the Perl Home Page. go look, bestie, your bug might already be there. 🔍

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please open an issue at <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. no giant wall-of-code dumps, we're keeping it cute and minimal. ✨

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a public issue tracker, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue. do not just post it publicly, i am begging. 🙈

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🫶 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. literally the easiest act of gratitude ever, and it goes so hard. 💌

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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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okay that's the whole page, you're officially caught up on perl5382delta. mwah 💋 and for the record, this gem was served to you from perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03. periodt. 👑✨