Issued:

2011-05-19

Updated:

2011-05-19

RHBA-2011:0559 - busybox bug fix update

Synopsis

busybox bug fix update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated busybox packages that fixes several bugs are now available.

Description

Busybox is a single binary containing a large number of system commands, including a shell. This package can be useful for recovering from certain types of system failures, particularly those involving broken shared libraries.

This update addresses the following issues:

• Previously, the cpio applet included with busybox printed summary messages to stdout instead of stderr as the stand alone cpio does. Consequently nothing was returned to the shell when the busybox cpio applet ran. The updated applet include a patch that corrects this: the busybox cpio applet now prints summary messages to stderr, returning information to the shell as the standalone utility does. (BZ#615391)

• As initially released, the "busybox hwclock" utility included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 honored the current Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS 2.3) and assumed the adjtime state file was at /var/lib/hwclock/adjtime. If kexec was invoked to load a second kernel over a crashed kernel, this caused "busybox hwclock" to return incorrect and inconsistent values when compared with the same command running in the first kernel prior to the crash. With this update, the config file for busybox hwclock was reverted to its old behavior. It now assumes the adjtime state file is at /etc/adjtime, as was the case in FHS 2.1, and "busybox hwclock" behaves as expected when run in an initial or reloaded kernel. (BZ#621853)

• The "busybox awk" utility incorrectly treated all strings of digits with leading zeros as octal integer constants. This meant strings such as "0xffff" and "07777" were handled correctly but strings such as "0.531" were not. As a consequence, awk operations that correctly manipulated such strings as numbers were not handled correctly by busybox awk. With this update, the awk utility included with busybox correctly differentiates between hexadecimal and floating decimal strings and handles manipulations of the latter as expected. (BZ#633961)

All busybox users should install this update, which fixes these bugs.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at This content is not included.https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• busybox-petitboot-1.15.1-11.el6.ppc64.rpm
• busybox-1.15.1-11.el6.x86_64.rpm
• busybox-petitboot-1.15.1-11.el6.x86_64.rpm
• busybox-petitboot-1.15.1-11.el6.i686.rpm
• busybox-1.15.1-11.el6.src.rpm
• busybox-1.15.1-11.el6.i686.rpm
• busybox-1.15.1-11.el6.ppc64.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 615391
• This content is not included.BZ - 621853

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.