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.