kareila: Taking refuge from falling debris under a computer desk. (computercrash)
kareila ([personal profile] kareila) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2010-01-12 07:45 am
Entry tags:

the hazards of coding for webservers vs. shell scripts

When I was doing some code cleanup a few months ago, I saw some lines that looked like this:

my $foo;
$foo = $bar unless $baz;


I decided that looked redundant and changed it to:

my $foo = $bar unless $baz;

Take my advice: don't combine "my" statements and postfix conditionals. Ever.

I've updated the programming guidelines to warn people away from this as well.

The manifestation of this particular bug was to cause the $foo variable to be referenced in global scope if the conditional was false. In that situation, the assigned value would persist across execution threads, such that if two people in a row had a true $baz, the second user would see the first user's value of $foo. Even with use warnings and use strict in effect, Perl apparently thinks this is perfectly fine.

ETA: [personal profile] exor674 says this command will find it (but not in BML files):

perlcritic --single-policy ProhibitConditionalDeclarations

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