I men­tioned in pass­ing last week that the next major release of Perl, v5.36, is set to enable warnings by default for code that opts in to use v5.35; or above. Commemorating Perl’s 34th birth­day the week before that, I not­ed that the warn­ings sys­tem has been get­ting ever finer-​grained since its intro­duc­tion in 2000. And fel­low Perl blog­ger and CPAN author Tom Wyant has been cat­a­loging his favorites over the past sev­er­al months—the lat­est as of this writ­ing was on the ambigu­ous” cat­e­go­ry of warn­ings, and you can find links to pre­vi­ous entries in his series at the bot­tom of that post.

It occurred to me after­ward that there may be some con­fu­sion between the warnings prag­ma and the relat­ed warn func­tion for report­ing arbi­trary run­time errors. warn out­puts its argu­ments to the stan­dard error (STDERR) stream, or if it’s not giv­en any then you get a string with any excep­tion from $@ ($EVAL_ERROR under use English) fol­lowed by a tab and then “...caught at <file> line x.” If that’s emp­ty too, a plain warn just says, Warning: something's wrong at <file> line x.”, which isn’t exact­ly help­ful, but then again you didn’t give it much to go on.

warn out­put doesn’t have to go to STDERR, and this is where the rela­tion to the warn­ings prag­ma comes in because both are gov­erned by the __WARN__ sig­nal han­dler in the %SIG hash. Normally, you might opt to only dis­play run­time warn­ings if a debug­ging flag is set, like so:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $DEBUG = 0;
$SIG{__WARN__} = sub { warn @_ if $DEBUG };
warn 'shhh'; # silenced

$DEBUG = 1;
warn 'hello warnings';

But if you set that sig­nal han­dler in a BEGIN block, it catch­es compile-​time warn­ings too, in which case flip­ping a flag after the fact has no effect—the compiler’s already run:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $DEBUG = 0;
BEGIN { $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { warn @_ if $DEBUG } }
my $foo = 'hello';
my $foo = 'world'; # no warning issued here

$DEBUG = 1;
my $foo = 'howdy'; # still nothing

By the way, both __WARN__ and __DIE__ hooks are also used by the Carp mod­ule and its friends, so you can use the same tech­nique with their enhanced output:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp qw(carp cluck);

my $DEBUG = 0;
BEGIN { $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { warn @_ if $DEBUG } }
carp 'quiet fish';

$DEBUG = 1;
loud_chicken();

sub loud_chicken {
    cluck 'here comes a stack trace';
}

You could use these as step­ping stones towards a debug log for larg­er appli­ca­tions, but at that point, I’d sug­gest look­ing into one of the log­ging mod­ules on CPAN like Log::Log4perl (not to be con­fused with that lately-​problematic Java library), Log::Dispatch (which can be wired into Log4perl), or some­thing else to suit your needs.

man cutting tress using chainsaw

The Java world had an… inter­est­ing week­end when secu­ri­ty researchers revealed on December 9 a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pop­u­lar Apache Log4j 2 soft­ware library for record­ing and debug­ging events. Systems as diverse as Amazon Web Services, Apple iCloud, and the Minecraft video game could be exploit­ed to run arbi­trary code on a serv­er mere­ly by send­ing a specially-​crafted string of text. Information tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­als have been scram­bling ever since the ini­tial dis­clo­sure to patch, upgrade, recon­fig­ure, or oth­er­wise pro­tect affect­ed servers. It’s bad, and past unpatched vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties like this have been respon­si­ble for the expo­sure of mil­lions of people’s sen­si­tive data.

Many Perl appli­ca­tions use the similarly-​named and ‑designed Log::Log4perl library, and the good news is that as far as I can tell the lat­ter doesn’t suf­fer from the type of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty described above. This doesn’t mean poorly-​written or ‑con­fig­ured Perl-​based sys­tems are immune to all exploits, just this par­tic­u­lar one. You should be safe to con­tin­ue using Log4perl unless some­one has delib­er­ate­ly con­fig­ured it oth­er­wise, and in fact, my work uses it extensively.

You might be sur­prised to read me sug­gest­ing a log­ging frame­work after writ­ing mul­ti­ple arti­cles espous­ing the Perl step debug­ger as an alter­na­tive. Log4perl devel­op­er Mike Schilli’s 2002 intro­duc­tion to the pack­age for Perl.com came down on the oppo­site side of the argu­ment. It can seem like one of those pro­gram­mer reli­gious issues like tabs vs. spaces, vim vs. Emacs, or Linux vs. Windows. (For the record, the cor­rect answers are spaces, BBEdit, and macOS. 😉)

But in this case, you can and should have the best of both worlds—logging at dif­fer­ent lev­els to appro­pri­ate des­ti­na­tions while still drop­ping into the inter­ac­tive debug­ger when you need to do some­thing trick­i­er like exam­ine pro­gram state or tweak a data struc­ture on the fly. I use both tech­niques and only empha­size the advo­ca­cy of step debug­ging because it’s under­stood less.