PERL5381DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perl5381delta — what's new for perl v5.38.1 💖

okay bestie, buckle up, this is the tea on perl5381delta, and it's living in the Perl Programmers Reference Guide section of your manual pages, 1perl ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

perl5381delta — what is new for perl v5.38.1

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So this doc is literally just the glow-up notes between the 5.38.0 release and the 5.38.1 release. That's it, that's the whole vibe. 🎀

But wait — if you're jumping up from something older, like from 5.36.0? bestie, stop right there ✋💖 you need to read perl5380delta first, because that one covers everything between 5.36.0 and 5.38.0. Do not skip that one, it's giving required reading.

🔒 Security 🔒

This release fixes the following security issues. And ngl, they're real ones, so pay attention 💅

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. 👏

So the situation is: 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. One byte sounds tiny but it absolutely is not, it's giving "one byte is all you need to be a menace" 😭

CVE-2023-47039 — Perl for Windows binary hijacking vulnerability 🪟💀

This one 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. teamwork makes the dream work fr fr 🫶

The lore: 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. Not it being a whole escalation path, I cannot 😭

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.38.1 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. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

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 the consistency 💅

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.38.1:

  • 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, y'all are loved 🌈

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 stays winning 🍓

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 <http://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>. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. This is the way. No cap, nobody can debug a 4000-line repro 🙈

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. 🔐

🎀 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 giving gratitude, it's giving community, it's giving main character energy 👑

🔥 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 was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, filed under PERL5381DELTA(1perl) 🌟 stay slaying, go read your perl5380delta if you're upgrading, and remember: patch your Perl, be kind to the bug reporters, and never trust the current working directory 🦋💜

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