=head1 NAME
-perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.23 $, $Date: 1999/05/23 16:08:30 $)
+perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.1 $, $Date: 2001/09/20 03:03:00 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
for Perl's milestone releases.
In particular, the core development team (known as the Perl Porters)
-are a rag-tag band of highly altruistic individuals committed
-to producing better software for free than you could hope to
-purchase for money. You may snoop on pending developments via
-nntp://news.perl.com/perl.porters-gw/ and the Deja archive at
-http://www.deja.com/ using the perl.porters-gw newsgroup, or you can
-subscribe to the mailing list by sending perl5-porters-request@perl.org
-a subscription request.
+are a rag-tag band of highly altruistic individuals committed to
+producing better software for free than you could hope to purchase for
+money. You may snoop on pending developments via
+nntp://news.perl.com/perl.porters-gw/
+or you can subscribe to the mailing list by sending
+perl5-porters-request@perl.org a subscription request
+(an empty message with no subject is fine).
While the GNU project includes Perl in its distributions, there's no
such thing as "GNU Perl". Perl is not produced nor maintained by the
Over a hundred quips by Larry, from postings of his or source code,
can be found at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/misc/lwall-quotes.txt.gz .
-Newer examples can be found by perusing Larry's postings:
-
- http://x1.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=*&DBS=2&ST=PS&defaultOp=AND&LNG=ALL&format=terse&showsort=date&maxhits=100&subjects=&groups=&authors=larry@*wall.org&fromdate=&todate=
-
=head2 How can I convince my sysadmin/supervisor/employees to use version 5/5.005/Perl instead of some other language?
If your manager or employees are wary of unsupported software, or
(Well, OK, maybe it's not quite that distinct, but you get the idea.)
If you want support and a reasonable guarantee that what you're
developing will continue to work in the future, then you have to run
-the supported version. As of early March 2001 that probably means
-running either of the releases 5.6.0 (released in March 2000) or
+the supported version. As of April 2001 that probably means
+running either of the releases 5.6.1 (released in April 2001) or
5.005_03 (released in March 1999), although 5.004_05 isn't that bad
if you B<absolutely> need such an old version (released in April 1999)
for stability reasons. Anything older than 5.004_05 shouldn't be used.
found in the optional 'suidperl' (not built or installed by default)
in all the Perl branches 5.6, 5.005, and 5.004, see
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/sperl-2000-08-05/
+Perl maintenance releases 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 have this security hole closed.
+Most, if not all, Linux distribution have patches for this
+vulnerability available, see http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/ ,
+but the most recommendable way is to upgrade to at least Perl 5.6.1.
=head1 AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Tom Christiansen and Nathan
Torkington. All rights reserved.
-When included as an integrated part of the Standard Distribution
-of Perl or of its documentation (printed or otherwise), this works is
-covered under Perl's Artistic Licence. For separate distributions of
-all or part of this FAQ outside of that, see L<perlfaq>.
+This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
+under the same terms as Perl itself.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here are in the public
domain. You are permitted and encouraged to use this code and any