Re: Problem with VMS Carriage return carriage control files in 5.10 and 5.12

On Apr 21, 2010, at 11:55 PM, Carl Friedberg wrote:

> About 7 weeks ago, I put 5.10.1 into production. It looked good  
> until the overnight production ran, and then all hell broke loose. I  
> did not have time to poke around, but the symptom was that  
> completely trivial perl scripts failed, with extra line breaks being  
> thrown into the output. I put the old version back, and everyone was  
> happy again. The offending (trivial) perl script was replaced with  
> an awk script.


First of all, it's good to see people using Perl in production on  
VMS.  Obviously it's a bit distressing to find out about an impediment  
to using the current or previous version just after a new major  
version has been released.  I think the next steps are to narrow down  
further where the behavior changed by testing against 5.8.9 and  
5.10.0.  If anyone has the opportunity to do that, please speak up.

The unwanted line break in Martin's example occurs at exactly 4048  
bytes into the file.  There is likely a buffer involved, but not a  
mailbox buffer since as far as I can tell there's no mailbox  
involved.  Of course it's possible this example dodged a bullet by  
hitting a record boundary earlier on and the real magic number is  
something less than 4048.  I'm going to have a crack at narrowing this  
down further.
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[email protected]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
  difficult than getting in."
                  Brad Leithauser