I’ve been building a little stand alone command line tool lately, which led to me looking at using App::FatPacker to make a standalone, single-script download. This was going well until I tried to load Digest::Perl::MD5, which caused fatpacker to mysteriously crash with an undefined value. The reason for this is interesting…

When fatpacker goes to analyze a module list, it at one stage runs require on all of them, like so:

require $_ for @packages;

Then later on it uses @packages and discovers that one of the elements has is now undef. How did this happen?

Well, if the module you require fiddles with $_ without localizing it first, that will ultimately result in modifying @packages. How did Digest::Perl::MD5 do this?

while (<DATA>) {

It read its data block at load load time. And of course, the last value in $_ there is undef. This all would have been avoided had the require loop been written out to be less golfy:

for my $package (@packages) {
    require $package;
}

Of course, this is the same function that had:

my %found;@found{map+($pack_rev{$INC{$_}}||()),@targets}=();

And anyone who would publish code with that in it is probably beyond hope. ;)

(Bugs with patches have been filed with both App::FatPacker and Digest::Perl::MD5. The latter, to just localize $_ before the while loop.)