Bug#916681: Perl::Tidy: tries to access file "SCALAR(0x...)" in cwd

[Jakub Wilk]

Package: perltidy
Version: 20180220-1
Control: affects -1 libperl-critic-perl
The attached test program print its own tidied source.
It seems to work correctly:

  $ perl selftidy
  #!/usr/bin/perl
  use Perl::Tidy qw(perltidy);
  my $dst;
  perltidy( source => $0, destination => \$dst );
  print($dst);

But in strace output you can see a spurious filesystem access:

  $ strace -o '| grep -w SCALAR >&2' perl selftidy > /dev/null
  stat64("SCALAR(0x56bcb8a8)", 0x56bac2b0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or 
directory)

I tracked it down to this code in Perl/Tidy.pm, lines 1278-1291:

       # set output file permissions
       if ( $output_file && -f $output_file && !-l $output_file ) {
           if ($input_file_permissions) {

               # give output script same permissions as input script, but
               # make it user-writable or else we can't run perltidy again.
               # Thus we retain whatever executable flags were set.
               if ( $rOpts->{'format'} eq 'tidy' ) {
                   chmod( $input_file_permissions | oct(600), $output_file );
               }

               # else use default permissions for html and any other format
           }
       }

Apparently this is run even when $output_file is a reference, not a 
pathname.


-- System Information:
Architecture: i386

Versions of packages perltidy depends on:
ii  perl  5.28.1-3

--
Jakub Wilk
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Perl::Tidy qw(perltidy);
my $dst;
perltidy(source => $0, destination => \$dst);
print($dst);