NAME¶
perl5125delta - what is new for perl v5.12.5
DESCRIPTION¶
This document describes differences between the 5.12.4 release and the 5.12.5
release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.3, first read
perl5124delta, which describes differences between 5.12.3 and 5.12.4.
Security¶
"Encode" decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)¶
A bug in "Encode" could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to
overflow. This problem has been corrected. Bug reported by Robert Zacek.
"File::Glob::bsd_glob()" memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728).¶
Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag
GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC would cause an access violation / segfault. A Perl program
that accepts a flags value from an external source could expose itself to
denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks. There are no known
exploits in the wild. The problem has been corrected by explicitly disabling
all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to null. Bug
reported by Clement Lecigne.
Heap buffer overrun in 'x' string repeat operator (CVE-2012-5195)¶
Poorly written perl code that allows an attacker to specify the count to perl's
'x' string repeat operator can already cause a memory exhaustion
denial-of-service attack. A flaw in versions of perl before 5.15.5 can
escalate that into a heap buffer overrun; coupled with versions of glibc
before 2.16, it possibly allows the execution of arbitrary code.
This problem has been fixed.
Incompatible Changes¶
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.4. If any exist, they
are bugs and reports are welcome.
Modules and Pragmata¶
Updated Modules¶
B::Concise
B::Concise no longer produces mangled output with the
-tree option [perl
#80632].
charnames
A regression introduced in Perl 5.8.8 has been fixed, that caused
charnames::viacode(0) to return "undef" instead of the string
"NULL" [perl #72624].
Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to version 2.39_01.
See "Security".
File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to version 1.07_01.
See "Security".
Unicode::UCD
The documentation for the "upper" function now actually says
"upper", not "lower".
Module::CoreList
Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.50_02 to add data for this
release.
Changes to Existing Documentation¶
perlebcdic¶
The perlebcdic document contains a helpful table to use in "tr///" to
convert between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII. Unfortunately, the table was the
inverse of the one it describes. This has been corrected.
perlunicode¶
The section on User-Defined Case Mappings had some bad markup and unclear
sentences, making parts of it unreadable. This has been rectified.
perluniprops¶
This document has been corrected to take non-ASCII platforms into account.
Installation and Configuration Improvements¶
- Mac OS X
- There have been configuration and test fixes to make Perl build cleanly on
Lion and Mountain Lion.
- NetBSD
- The NetBSD hints file was corrected to be compatible with NetBSD 6.*
Selected Bug Fixes¶
- •
- "chop" now correctly handles characters above
"\x{7fffffff}" [perl #73246].
- •
- "($<,$>) = (...)" stopped working properly in 5.12.0. It
is supposed to make a single "setreuid()" call, rather than
calling "setruid()" and "seteuid()" separately.
Consequently it did not work properly. This has been fixed [perl
#75212].
- •
- Fixed a regression of kill() when a match variable is used for the
process ID to kill [perl #75812].
- •
- "UNIVERSAL::VERSION" no longer leaks memory. It started leaking
in Perl 5.10.0.
- •
- The C-level "my_strftime" functions no longer leaks memory. This
fixes a memory leak in "POSIX::strftime" [perl #73520].
- •
- "caller" no longer leaks memory when called from the DB package
if @DB::args was assigned to after the first call to "caller".
Carp was triggering this bug [perl #97010].
- •
- Passing to "index" an offset beyond the end of the string when
the string is encoded internally in UTF8 no longer causes panics [perl
#75898].
- •
- Syntax errors in "(?{...})" blocks in regular expressions no
longer cause panic messages [perl #2353].
- •
- Perl 5.10.0 introduced some faulty logic that made "U*" in the
middle of a pack template equivalent to "U0" if the input string
was empty. This has been fixed [perl #90160].
Errata¶
split() and @_¶
split() no longer modifies @_ when called in scalar or void context. In
void context it now produces a "Useless use of split" warning. This
is actually a change introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from that
release's perl5120delta.
Acknowledgements¶
Perl 5.12.5 represents approximately 17 months of development since Perl 5.12.4
and contains approximately 1,900 lines of changes across 64 files from 18
authors.
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 5.12.5:
Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, David Mitchell, Dominic
Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, George Greer, Goro Fuji,
Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Nicholas Clark, Rafael
Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, 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.
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 articles recently
posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at
http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ . There may also be information 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.
If the bug you are 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 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.
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.