Are you suggesting that the Perl community didn't follow the strategy of a) making this mistake over and over for a decade b) finally realizing, in the course

Are you suggesting that the Perl community didn't follow the strategy of a) making this mistake over and over for a decade b) finally realizing, in the course of some blog posts or their equivalent, that they needed a library to fix it? c) making that library? Because here's what appears to be the Perl equivalent of this Ruby blog post, from 2005: http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?cid=45240&sid=29890 http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?cid=45240&sid=29890 This post is promoting the Proc::UID library, which was apparently only a year old at the time and was not quite finished. The release on CPAN was marked "for testing and review purposes only. Please do not use in production code." http://search.cpan.org/~pjf/Proc-UID-0.04/UID.pm http://search.cpan.org/~pjf/Proc-UID-0.04/UID.pm The newer Privileges::Drop library, which you link to, dates back only to 2007. Perl is more mature than Ruby. But perhaps only a few years more mature.