But it looks like things that use the system libc, like ping, _are_ accepting this. So there's clearly a case where your Perl code could treat it one way, your

But it looks like things that use the system libc, like ping, _are_ accepting this. So there's clearly a case where your Perl code could treat it one way, your system another, and that skew could lead to bugs, including security bugs. That all said, I totally agree that the best solution is to simply not accept a leading 0 in an IPv4 octet.