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perl-5.44.0
⭐ Starred 2013 / ptargrep
Security Advisories (1)
CVE-2026-15534 (2026-08-09)

Perl versions through 5.45.1 have out-of-bounds heap reads and writes during regular expression matching via an undersized superlinear cache in S_regmatch. The regex engine's superlinear cache holds one bit per subject position for each participating WHILEM node, so the bit count is the subject length plus one times the number of nodes. Nothing checks that product for positive overflow of the signed 32-bit count: a 286331153 byte subject matched against a pattern with 15 participating nodes stores the count as 14, leaving a two byte cache. The cache is then indexed from the real match position and node number, so reads go past the end of the allocation, and on failure CACHEsayNO sets a bit past it. A caller that matches an attacker controlled subject of this size against a pattern of this shape can crash the process or corrupt heap memory.

NAME

ptargrep - Apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar archive

SYNOPSIS

ptargrep [options] <pattern> <tar file> ...

Options:

 --basename|-b     ignore directory paths from archive
 --ignore-case|-i  do case-insensitive pattern matching
 --list-only|-l    list matching filenames rather than extracting matches
 --verbose|-v      write debugging message to STDERR
 --help|-?         detailed help message

DESCRIPTION

This utility allows you to apply pattern matching to the contents of files contained in a tar archive. You might use this to identify all files in an archive which contain lines matching the specified pattern and either print out the pathnames or extract the files.

The pattern will be used as a Perl regular expression (as opposed to a simple grep regex).

Multiple tar archive filenames can be specified - they will each be processed in turn.

OPTIONS

--basename (alias -b)

When matching files are extracted, ignore the directory path from the archive and write to the current directory using the basename of the file from the archive. Beware: if two matching files in the archive have the same basename, the second file extracted will overwrite the first.

--ignore-case (alias -i)

Make pattern matching case-insensitive.

--list-only (alias -l)

Print the pathname of each matching file from the archive to STDOUT. Without this option, the default behaviour is to extract each matching file.

--verbose (alias -v)

Log debugging info to STDERR.

--help (alias -?)

Display this documentation.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010 Grant McLean <grantm@cpan.org>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.