Re: So, now what are taints?

[biosysadmin]

It's a mode used to keep you honest when accepting input from potentially unsafe sources, such as CGI scripts. It's a good thing for certain applications, but you should definitely understand what it's doing before using it. Using warnings and strict are more general pragmas that could reasonably be applied to all of your programs, taint checking has a more specific application.

See the perlsec manpage for more information.