What is perlfunc in Perl 5.34.0?

Perl is a widely used general-purpose programming language. It offers many services, ranging from text manipulation to GUI development and much more.

There were many enhancements from the Perl 5.32.0 release and the 5.34.0 release. Click here for a full list of differences between the two versions.

In this shot, we discuss perlfunc in Perl 5.34.0.

perlfunc refers to the built-in function in Perl language. Here is the full documentation for perlfunc. Let’s look at a few categories of perlfunc and how these methods changed in Perl v5.34.0.

Categories of perlfunc

1. Functions for SCALARs or strings

2. Regular expressions and pattern matching

3. Numeric functions

4. Functions for real @ARRAYs

5. Functions for list data

6. Functions for real %HASHes

7. Input and output functions

8. Functions for fixed-length data or records

9. Functions for filehandles, files, or directories

10. Keywords related to the control flow of a Perl program

11. Miscellaneous functions: defined, formline, lock, prototype, reset, scalar, undef

12. Functions for processes and process groups

13. Keywords related to Perl modules: do, import, no, package, require, use

14. Keywords related to classes and object-orientation

15. Low-level socket functions

16. System V interprocess communication functions

17. Fetching user and group info

18. Fetching network info

19. Time-related functions

20. Non-function keywords

Changes in perlfunc

There were several notable changes in Perl v5.34.0.

1. The widely used methods my() and state() did not previously warn users when variables with similar scope were re-declared. However, this has been resolved with better documentation for the my() and state() methods, which now give warnings to users in situations where some lexical variables are re-declared.

2. There are some changes to the localtime entry. This has been improved to always return the result of this method in English.

3. perlfunc documentation has been updated to provide a much clearer understanding of what happens when the sleep method is called and passes a value less than or equal to zero.

4. The split() method previously had a confusing documentation, which was changed upon user requests for split() documentation to be simplified without the use of join()s in their examples.

5. In the documentation of the msgsnd() method, a length field was also included. However, in reality, this length field did not exist in the MSG parameter to the msgsnd() method. This has been resolved.