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B::Lint - Perl lint


perl -MO=Lint[,OPTIONS] foo.pl


The B::Lint module is equivalent to an extended version of the -w option of perl. It is named after the program lint which carries out a similar process for C programs.


Option words are separated by commas (not whitespace) and follow the usual conventions of compiler backend options. Following any options (indicated by a leading -) come lint check arguments. Each such argument (apart from the special all and none options) is a word representing one possible lint check (turning on that check) or is no-foo (turning off that check). Before processing the check arguments, a standard list of checks is turned on. Later options override earlier ones. Available options are:


Produces a warning whenever the magic <> readline is used. Internally it uses perl's two-argument open which itself treats filenames with special characters specially. This could allow interestingly named files to have unexpected effects when reading.

  % touch 'rm *|'
  % perl -pe 1

The above creates a file named rm *|. When perl opens it with <> it actually executes the shell program rm *. This makes <> dangerous to use carelessly.


Produces a warning whenever an array is used in an implicit scalar context. For example, both of the lines

    $foo = length(@bar);
    $foo = @bar;

will elicit a warning. Using an explicit scalar() silences the warning. For example,

    $foo = scalar(@bar);
implicit-read and implicit-write

These options produce a warning whenever an operation implicitly reads or (respectively) writes to one of Perl's special variables. For example, implicit-read will warn about these:


and implicit-write will warn about these:


Both implicit-read and implicit-write warn about this:

    for (@a) { ... }

This option warns whenever a bareword is implicitly quoted, but is also the name of a subroutine in the current package. Typical mistakes that it will trap are:

    use constant foo => 'bar';
    @a = ( foo => 1 );
    $b{foo} = 2;

Neither of these will do what a naive user would expect.


This option warns whenever $_ is used either explicitly anywhere or as the implicit argument of a print statement.


This option warns on each use of any variable, subroutine or method name that lives in a non-current package but begins with an underscore ("_"). Warnings aren't issued for the special case of the single character name "_" by itself (e.g. $_ and @_).


This option warns whenever an undefined subroutine is invoked. This option will only catch explicitly invoked subroutines such as foo() and not indirect invocations such as &$subref() or $obj->meth(). Note that some programs or modules delay definition of subs until runtime by means of the AUTOLOAD mechanism.


This option warns whenever one of the regexp variables $`, $& or $' is used. Any occurrence of any of these variables in your program can slow your whole program down. See perlre for details.


Turn all warnings on.


Turn all warnings off.


-u Package

Normally, Lint only checks the main code of the program together with all subs defined in package main. The -u option lets you include other package names whose subs are then checked by Lint.


Lint can be extended by with plugins. Lint uses Module::Pluggable to find available plugins. Plugins are expected but not required to inform Lint of which checks they are adding.

The B::Lint->register_plugin( MyPlugin => \@new_checks ) method adds the list of @new_checks to the list of valid checks. If your module wasn't loaded by Module::Pluggable then your class name is added to the list of plugins.

You must create a match( \%checks ) method in your plugin class or one of its parents. It will be called on every op as a regular method call with a hash ref of checks as its parameter.

The class methods B::Lint->file and B::Lint->line contain the current filename and line number.

  package Sample;
  use B::Lint;
  B::Lint->register_plugin( Sample => [ 'good_taste' ] );
  sub match {
      my ( $op, $checks_href ) = shift @_;
      if ( $checks_href->{good_taste} ) {


while(<FH>) stomps $_
strict oo
unchecked system calls
more tests, validate against older perls


This is only a very preliminary version.


Malcolm Beattie, mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk.


Sebastien Aperghis-Tramoni - bug fixes