PERL5242DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 PERL5242DELTA — what's new for perl v5.24.2 💖

okay bestie, you found the perl5242delta page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and honestly? it's a short one but it's got DRAMA. security drama. let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

perl5242delta — what is new for perl v5.24.2 🎀

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This doc is the tea on what changed between the 5.24.1 release and the 5.24.2 release. that's it, that's the vibe.

if you're jumping up from something older like 5.24.0, no worries, but do the reading in order: go peep perl5241delta first, because that one covers the differences between 5.24.0 and 5.24.1. catch up properly, periodt 💅

🔒 Security 🔒

🚨 Improved handling of . in @INC in base.pm 🚨

the whole saga of (removing) . in @INC inside base got handled better. this fixes some messy behaviour that came from the approach taken back in Perl 5.24.1 — and honestly the best way to understand that mess is to go read the two threads on the Perl 5 Porters mailing list:

<http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2016/08/msg238991.html>, <http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2016/10/msg240297.html>.

like, it's giving "we tried a thing and the thing had ✨consequences✨". now it's fixed. slay.

🚨 "Escaped" colons and relative paths in PATH 🚨

on Unix systems, Perl treats any relative paths in the PATH environment variable as tainted when it starts a new process. but before this fix, it was letting a backslash escape a colon — which, btw, the OS does not do — so relative paths could sneak through and be considered safe if the PATH was set to something like "/\:.". the check has been fixed so that . counts as tainted in that example. no more loopholes bestie 😤

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

⭐ Updated Modules and Pragmata ⭐

  • base has been upgraded from version 2.23 to 2.23_01. 🔥
  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20170114_24 to 5.20170715_24. 🔥

🐛 Selected Bug Fixes 🐛

👑 Acknowledgements 👑

Perl 5.24.2 represents approximately 6 months of development since Perl 5.24.1, and it contains approximately 2,500 lines of changes across 53 files from 18 authors. not me being emotional about a patch release 😭

if we exclude auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 960 lines of changes to 17 .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 5.24.2:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Dan Collins, 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, Yves Orton.

the list above is almost certainly incomplete, since it's automatically generated from version control history. specifically, 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 🫶

a lot of the changes 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 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 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. 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. give them something small and juicy to chew on, not a whole saga 😌

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. keep that one on the low, fr fr 🔐

👀 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, you're all caught up 💅✨

this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, from the PERL5242DELTA(1perl) page — mwah, go touch some grass, you earned it 🌸🦋

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