PERLDELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)
NAME
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.38.4
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.38.3 release and the
5.38.4 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.38.2, first read
perl5383delta, which describes differences between 5.38.2 and 5.38.3.
Security
[CVE-2024-56406] Heap buffer overflow vulnerability with tr//
A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl.
When there are non-ASCII bytes in the left-hand-side of the "tr"
operator, S_do_trans_invmap() can overflow the destination pointer "d".
$ perl -e '$_ = "\x{FF}" x 1000000; tr/\xFF/\x{100}/;'
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
It is believed that this vulnerability can enable Denial of Service or
Arbitrary Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient
defenses.
Discovered by: Nathan Mills.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.38.3. If any
exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report. See
"Reporting Bugs" below.
Modules and Pragmata
Updated Modules and Pragmata
o Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20250118_38 to
5.20250413_38.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.38.4 represents approximately 3 months of development since Perl
5.38.3 and contains approximately 1,500 lines of changes across 36
files from 7 authors.
Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 640 lines of changes to 5 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.
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 5.38.4:
Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Max Maischein, Paul Evans, Richard Leach,
Steve Hay, Thibault Duponchelle.
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 perl bug
database at <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>. There may also be
information at <https://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.
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.
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.
perl v5.38.4 2025-04-14 PERLDELTA(1)
perl 5.38.4 - Generated Wed May 7 08:07:46 CDT 2025