Issued:

2012-03-13

Updated:

2012-06-20

RHBA-2012:0385 - gawk bug fix update

Synopsis

gawk bug fix update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated gawk package that fixes three bugs is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The gawk package contains the GNU version of awk, a text processing utility. AWK interprets a special-purpose programming language to do quick and easy text pattern matching and reformatting jobs.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Prior to this update, the gawk utility could, under certain circumstances, interpret some run-time variables as internal zero-length variable prototypes. When gawk tried to free such run-time variables, it actually freed the internal prototypes, that were allocated just once due to memory savings. As a consequence, gawk sometimes failed and the error message "awk: double free or corruption" was displayed. With this update the problem has been corrected and the error no longer occurs. (BZ#648906)

• Prior to this update, the gawk utility did not copy variables from the command line arguments. As a consequence, the variables were not accessible as intended. This update modifies the underlying code so that gawk makes copies of those variables. (BZ#740673)

• Prior to this update, the Yacc interpreter encountered problems handling larger stacks. As a consequence, the Yacc interpreter could fail with a stack overflow error when interpreting the AWK code. This update enlarges the stack and Yacc can now handle these AWK programs. (BZ#743242)

All users of gawk are advised to upgrade to this updated package, 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

• gawk-3.1.7-9.el6.src.rpm
• gawk-3.1.7-9.el6.ppc64.rpm
• gawk-debuginfo-3.1.7-9.el6.s390x.rpm
• gawk-debuginfo-3.1.7-9.el6.i686.rpm
• gawk-3.1.7-9.el6.s390x.rpm
• gawk-debuginfo-3.1.7-9.el6.x86_64.rpm
• gawk-3.1.7-9.el6.i686.rpm
• gawk-3.1.7-9.el6.x86_64.rpm
• gawk-debuginfo-3.1.7-9.el6.ppc64.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 648906
• This content is not included.BZ - 743242

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.