Security Advisories (5)
CVE-2023-47038 (2023-10-30)

A crafted regular expression when compiled by perl 5.30.0 through 5.38.0 can cause a one attacker controlled byte buffer overflow in a heap allocated buffer

CVE-2023-47100

In Perl before 5.38.2, S_parse_uniprop_string in regcomp.c can write to unallocated space because a property name associated with a \p{...} regular expression construct is mishandled. The earliest affected version is 5.30.0.

CVE-2023-47039 (2023-10-30)

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.

CVE-2024-56406 (2025-04-13)

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Perl. Release branches 5.34, 5.36, 5.38 and 5.40 are affected, including development versions from 5.33.1 through 5.41.10. 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 and possibly Code Execution attacks on platforms that lack sufficient defenses.

CVE-2025-40909 (2025-05-30)

Perl threads have a working directory race condition where file operations may target unintended paths. If a directory handle is open at thread creation, the process-wide current working directory is temporarily changed in order to clone that handle for the new thread, which is visible from any third (or more) thread already running. This may lead to unintended operations such as loading code or accessing files from unexpected locations, which a local attacker may be able to exploit. The bug was introduced in commit 11a11ecf4bea72b17d250cfb43c897be1341861e and released in Perl version 5.13.6

NAME

Text::Tabs - expand and unexpand tabs like unix expand(1) and unexpand(1)

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Tabs;

$tabstop = 4;  # default = 8
@lines_without_tabs = expand(@lines_with_tabs);
@lines_with_tabs = unexpand(@lines_without_tabs);

DESCRIPTION

Text::Tabs does most of what the unix utilities expand(1) and unexpand(1) do. Given a line with tabs in it, expand replaces those tabs with the appropriate number of spaces. Given a line with or without tabs in it, unexpand adds tabs when it can save bytes by doing so, like the unexpand -a command.

Unlike the old unix utilities, this module correctly accounts for any Unicode combining characters (such as diacriticals) that may occur in each line for both expansion and unexpansion. These are overstrike characters that do not increment the logical position. Make sure you have the appropriate Unicode settings enabled.

EXPORTS

The following are exported:

expand
unexpand
$tabstop

The $tabstop variable controls how many column positions apart each tabstop is. The default is 8.

Please note that local($tabstop) doesn't do the right thing and if you want to use local to override $tabstop, you need to use local($Text::Tabs::tabstop).

EXAMPLE

#!perl
# unexpand -a
use Text::Tabs;

while (<>) {
  print unexpand $_;
}

Instead of the shell's expand command, use:

perl -MText::Tabs -n -e 'print expand $_'

Instead of the shell's unexpand -a command, use:

perl -MText::Tabs -n -e 'print unexpand $_'

BUGS

Text::Tabs handles only tabs ("\t") and combining characters (/\pM/). It doesn't count backwards for backspaces ("\t"), omit other non-printing control characters (/\pC/), or otherwise deal with any other zero-, half-, and full-width characters.

LICENSE

Copyright (C) 1996-2002,2005,2006 David Muir Sharnoff. Copyright (C) 2005 Aristotle Pagaltzis Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Google, Inc. This module may be modified, used, copied, and redistributed at your own risk. Although allowed by the preceding license, please do not publicly redistribute modified versions of this code with the name "Text::Tabs" unless it passes the unmodified Text::Tabs test suite.