Perl 5.5 and socket

ruzam has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have the following (reduced) code:

use Socket;
socket(my $socket, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, getprotobyname('tcp'));
[download]

This works fine for me and many other versions of Perl. But in Perl 5.5 (at least, maybe lower versions as well), it results in the error:

Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at ...
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(this is coming from a CPAN test FAIL Device-CableModem-SURFboard-0.02)

My suspicion is the use of 'my $socket' instead of named literal. I can easily replace it with a named literal (say 'SOCKET') if that will work on lower Perl versions, but I have no way to test it.

If the failure is the result of something else (the other socket() parameters) then I'm at a loss as to how/if I should modify the code.

Comment on Perl 5.5 and socket Select or Download Code

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Re: Perl 5.5 and socket by Burak (Chaplain) on Dec 22, 2007 at 17:41 UTC
Using lexicals instead of globs is a feature that came with the 5.6 series. You must use a glob or get a lexical referencing a glob from the Symbol module.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl 5.5 and socket by eserte (Deacon) on Dec 22, 2007 at 18:36 UTC
Or just increase the requirement of the distribution to 5.6.0: `use 5.006;` [download] in your Makefile.PL should do it.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Perl 5.5 and socket by ruzam (Curate) on Dec 22, 2007 at 20:18 UTC
I may resort to a version limit yet, but for now I simply changed the lexical (it's a small piece of code). Besides, I had to clean up some documentation anyway. When the new updates have finished running through tests, I find out how much further I should bother to go with version limiting.	[reply]
Re: Perl 5.5 and socket by grinder (Bishop) on Dec 22, 2007 at 21:41 UTC
You may use `gensym` to work around this particular issue. Have a look at `rmtree` (or verily `_rmtree` in a recent(2.0+) version of File::Path for One Way To Do It. • another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl	[reply]