“fun” bug in 64-bit perl 5.10.0 bigint sprintf

Here’s a rather unexpected bug with perl sprintf

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use bigint ;

my $a = hex( "0x0A0000001D05A820" ) ;
printf( "0x%016X\n", $a ) ;
printf( "%d\n", $a ) ;
printf( "$a\n" ) ;

The %X printf produces a value where the least significant 0x20 is lost:

$ ./bigint
0x0A0000001D05A800
720575940866189312
720575940866189344

Observe that the loss occurs in the printf and not the hex() call, since 720575940866189344 == 0x0A0000001D05A820.

This bug appears to be fixed in some version of perl <= 5.16.2. Oh, the joys of using ancient operating system versions so that we can support customers on many of the ancient deployments that they seem to like to run on.