PERL5384DELTA(1)

📦
version 5.42.3 · 9 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 PERL5384DELTA 💖

okay bestie, gather round — this is the tea on perl5384delta, aka what is new for perl v5.38.4, straight from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. Yes it's a manual page, yes I'm making it cute, no the facts aren't going anywhere. 🫶

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So here's the deal: this doc spills the differences between the 5.38.3 release and the 5.38.4 release. That's it. That's the whole plot.

But wait — if you're jumping up from something older, like 5.38.2, you gotta go read perl5383delta first, because that one covers everything between 5.38.2 and 5.38.3. Don't skip it, it's giving prerequisites. 📚

🚨 Security 🚨

[CVE-2024-56406] Heap buffer overflow vulnerability with tr//

okay so this part is the serious part, bestie, pay attention — a heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. 😭

Here's the situation: when there are non-ASCII bytes in the left-hand-side of the tr operator, S_do_trans_invmap() can overflow the destination pointer d.

Not me showing you the actual crime scene:

$ perl -e '$_ = "\x{FF}" x 1000000; tr/\xFF/\x{100}/;'
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Yeah. Segmentation fault (core dumped). 💀

It is believed that this vulnerability can enable Denial of Service or Arbitrary Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient defenses. So like... on platforms that don't have the defenses, this is highkey bad. Not a vibe. 🚩

Discovered by: Nathan Mills. (ty for your service king/queen/monarch 🫡)

💔 Incompatible Changes 💔

good news era: there are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.38.3. None. Zero. Nada. ✨

And like, if any do exist? They're bugs, fr fr. So please submit a report — check out "Reporting Bugs" below for the deets. 📝

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20250118_38 to 5.20250413_38. That's the whole list, bestie. One (1) glow-up. 💅

🌸 Acknowledgements 🌸

Okay this is the part where we clap for the people. 👏

Perl 5.38.4 represents approximately 3 months of development since Perl 5.38.3, and contains approximately 1,500 lines of changes across 36 files from 7 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 640 lines of changes to 5 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. (fourth decade!! iconic behavior!!) 🌈👑

The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.38.4:

Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Max Maischein, Paul Evans, Richard Leach, Steve Hay, Thibault Duponchelle.

Heads up: the list above is almost certainly incomplete because it's 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. So if you're not on it, you're still a real one. 🫶

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://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>. There may also be information at <https://www.perl.org/>, the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please open an issue at <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>. And please please please be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. We love a minimal repro. We do not love a 4,000-line paste. 🙈

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 yeet it into the public tracker, bestie. 🚫

🎀 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. It's literally that easy and it makes people's whole day. 🥹💖

👀 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 lil tour was brought to you by perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 — the original manual page signed off as PERL5384DELTA(1), and honestly? she ate. mwah. 😘🎀🦋

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