I am writing a script that needs to save it's state to a file and then load it in again later. I use the convention of using the S namespace to denote that the variable should be saved.

I am actually using a very light weight custom dumper function, but I was able to replicate the problem with the standard Data::Dumper library.

I was able to boil down the problem to this script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -T

use Data::Dumper;

$S::taint = $ARGV[0];

while (my ($name, $glob) = each %S::) {
    if (defined $$glob) {print Dumper($$glob)}
    print Dumper("$$glob") if (defined $$glob);
    print Dumper($$glob) if (defined $$glob);
}

[download]

In the while loop, the first and second line work just fine. However, the third line (which I happened to use) results in a fatal run-time error. Specifically Can't coerce GLOB to string in padsv at ./taint.pl line 10.

My version of Perl is: This is perl, v5.8.5 built for i386-freebsd-thread-multi-64int

Am I missing something, or if this an error somewhere with the Perl internals?

Thanks!

In reply to Strange error dumping tainted data by zealot

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