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perl-5.40.4
⭐ Starred 2013 / File::Compare
Security Advisories (2)
CVE-2026-8376 (2026-05-25)

Perl versions through 5.43.10 have a heap buffer overflow when compiling regular expressions with a repeated fixed string on 32-bit builds. Perl_study_chunk in regcomp_study.c checked the size of the joined substring buffer in characters rather than bytes. For a quantified fixed substring with a large minimum count, the byte length mincount * l could overflow SSize_t, producing an undersized SvGROW allocation; the subsequent copy writes past the end of the buffer. A caller that compiles an attacker-controlled regular expression on a 32-bit perl build triggers a heap buffer overflow at compile time.

CVE-2025-40909 (2025-05-30)

Perl threads have a working directory race condition where file operations may target unintended paths. If a directory handle is open at thread creation, the process-wide current working directory is temporarily changed in order to clone that handle for the new thread, which is visible from any third (or more) thread already running. This may lead to unintended operations such as loading code or accessing files from unexpected locations, which a local attacker may be able to exploit. The bug was introduced in commit 11a11ecf4bea72b17d250cfb43c897be1341861e and released in Perl version 5.13.6

NAME

File::Compare - Compare files or filehandles

SYNOPSIS

  	use File::Compare;

	if (compare("file1", "file2") == 0) {
	    print "They're equal\n";
	}

DESCRIPTION

The File::Compare::compare function compares the contents of two sources, each of which can be a file or a file handle. It is exported from File::Compare by default.

File::Compare::cmp is a synonym for File::Compare::compare. It is exported from File::Compare only by request.

File::Compare::compare_text does a line by line comparison of the two files. It stops as soon as a difference is detected. compare_text() accepts an optional third argument: This must be a CODE reference to a line comparison function, which returns 0 when both lines are considered equal. For example:

compare_text($file1, $file2)

is basically equivalent to

compare_text($file1, $file2, sub {$_[0] ne $_[1]} )

RETURN

File::Compare::compare and its sibling functions return 0 if the files are equal, 1 if the files are unequal, or -1 if an error was encountered.

AUTHOR

File::Compare was written by Nick Ing-Simmons. Its original documentation was written by Chip Salzenberg.