I know that whenever someone claims "there's a bug in perl" they're usually wrong. I also know that pretty much everyone who does this claims to be an exception to that rule. But when you get perl to dump core during compilation, I think it's safe to say something's not working how it should.

First, some stats:

The contents of file test.pl: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use test;

[download]
The contents of file test.pm: 
@A = ();
%B = ();
sub

[download]

This code is obviously wrong, but I'd expect the compiler to tell me that, not to crash:

% ./test.pl
zsh: segmentation fault  ./test.pl
% perl -c test.pl
zsh: segmentation fault  perl -c test.pl
%

I get the same behavior with various names for the files and variables. It doesn't seem to matter whether the variables are lexical or global, or whether they're hashes or arrays, but you have to have two assignments of an empty list into a non-scalar variable. And you have to do it in a "use"'d module.

Is this an undocumented feature? A known bug, or unknown? Most of my typical debugging tools aren't available to me, since it crashes during compilation.

(In my actual code, the problem ended up being relatively easy to find and fix: I accidentally left an extra sub with no code block before the final 1; in my module. I'm still curious why this happens though...)

Thanks!

Alan

In reply to Bug in perl 5.6.0? by ferrency

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