PERL5224DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perl5224delta — what's new for perl v5.22.4 💖

okay bestie, sit down, grab a boba 🧋, because this is the tea on perl5224delta — aka the PERL5224DELTA(1perl) page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. it's the little glow-up doc for one very specific patch release, and we're going through it together. no skipping. periodt. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

perl5224delta — literally just: what is new for perl v5.22.4 🌸

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so this doc spills the differences between the 5.22.3 release and the 5.22.4 release. that's it, that's the whole glow-up. short queen energy. 👑

if you're upgrading from something even older — like say 5.22.2 — you gotta read perl5223delta FIRST, because that one covers what went down between 5.22.2 and 5.22.3. don't skip the prereqs, iykyk. 📚

🔒 Security 🔒

🛡️ Improved handling of '.' in @INC in base.pm 🛡️

so the way base handles (the removal of) . in @INC has been improved. this fixes some truly problematic behaviour in the approach that Perl 5.22.3 took — and honestly the best way to explain it is to just send you the receipts, aka these two threads on the Perl 5 Porters mailing list:

go read them if you want the full lore. 🍵

🕵️ "Escaped" colons and relative paths in PATH 🕵️

okay this one is lowkey scary so listen up. on Unix systems, Perl treats any relative paths in the PATH environment variable as tainted when it starts a new process. that's the rule. 🚨

BUT before this fix, it was letting a backslash escape a colon (which the OS does not do, bestie, that's the whole problem), so a relative path could sneak through and be considered safe if PATH was set to something like "/\:.". 🙈

the check has been fixed, so now . is treated as tainted in that example. slay. the hole is closed. 🫶

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

⬆️ Updated Modules and Pragmata ⬆️

  • base has been upgraded from version 2.22 to 2.22_01. 💫
  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20170114_22 to 5.20170715_22. 💫

two little glow-ups. small but mighty. ✨

🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.22.4 represents approximately 6 months of development since Perl 5.22.3, and contains approximately 2,200 lines of changes across 52 files from 16 authors. that's a whole semester of work, fr fr. 😭

and excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 970 lines of changes to 18 .pm, .t, .c and .h files. 💪

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 5.22.4:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, David Mitchell, Eric Herman, Father Chrysostomos, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Sawyer X, Stevan Little, Steve Hay, Tony Cook.

the list above is almost certainly incomplete — 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.

many of the changes in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core, and 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 something 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 <https://rt.perl.org/>. there may also be info at <http://www.perl.org/>, the Perl Home Page. 🔍

if you believe you've got an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program that comes with your release. be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case — the smaller the better, bestie, that's the vibe. 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're 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'll 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. kthanks bye. 💅

👀 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!! 🎀 it's giving "tiny patch release with big security energy" and we ate. 💅✨

this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, straight from the PERL5224DELTA(1perl) corner of the universe. mwah. 😘 🌸🦋💖

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