Perl's copious documentation is one of the things that keeps me using it. But a pretty good idea where to start looking, can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Fortunately, we have Joshua ben Jore's perldoc-search, which will find anything you can specify as a regular expression, and that Perl itself can find.

Unfortunately, this can sometimes be a bit too much. I generally have several Perl kits unpacked in my home direc…

This post is a follow-up to MacPorts openssl versus Perl. That post told of a problem with a recent MacPorts openssl upgrade, and gave a workaround.

The right thing to do, however, is to use the current openssl. That involves finding all Perl modules that use openssl and re-installing them.

To do this, I wrote a small Perl script that traversed @INC looking for binary files. It spawned the file command to determine whet…

This is only of interest to Mac users who link their Perl against

This morning I found that Perl code that used LWP::Protocol::https was failing, but only when run by the test harness.

After some flailing around I managed to track this to the fact that I had just updated MacPorts, and taken openssl from 1.0.2f_0 to 1.0.2g_0. I still do not know the precise cause of the failure, but it was exposed by the fact that the test harness (whether ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build) set PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1.

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