PERLOPENBSD(1)

💖 perlopenbsd — Perl version 5 on OpenBSD systems 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the perlopenbsd page ✨ it's the manual for perlopenbsd, aka the whole rundown on running Perl version 5 (and yes, from here on out we're just calling it Perl 💅) on OpenBSD systems 🐡

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so this doc spills the tea on all the various OpenBSD features that affect how Perl version 5 gets compiled and/or runs 🫶 no cap, if you're building or running Perl on OpenBSD, this is your page.

🌸 OpenBSD core dumps from getprotobyname_r and getservbyname_r with ithreads 🌸

okay so when Perl is configured to use ithreads, it's gonna reach for the re-entrant library calls instead of the non-re-entrant versions — like, it prefers the fancy _r ones, periodt ✨

but here's the drama: there's an incompatibility in OpenBSD's getprotobyname_r and getservbyname_r functions in versions 3.7 and later that will cause a SEGV when they're called without doing a bzero on their return structs prior to calling these functions 😭 like, you gotta zero out those structs first or it's giving crash.

good news tho: current Perl's should handle this problem correctly 👑

bad news for the old heads: older threaded Perls (5.8.6 or earlier) will run into this problem 💀 so if you want to run a threaded Perl on OpenBSD 3.7 or higher, you will need to upgrade to at least Perl 5.8.7. that's the vibe check, fr fr.

⚠️ lowkey important: if you're on a threaded Perl 5.8.6 or earlier + OpenBSD 3.7 or newer, just upgrade bestie, don't fight it 🙈

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Steve Peters <steve@fisharerojo.org> 💌

Please report any errors, updates, or suggestions to <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues> — like, they genuinely wanna hear from you 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🌈 this was perlopenbsd, straight from perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 — main character energy from start to finish 💅✨ mwah 🎀