Issued:
2012-06-20
Updated:
2012-06-20

RHBA-2012:0933 - coreutils bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

coreutils bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated coreutils packages that fix several bugs and add two enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The coreutils packages contain the core GNU utilities. These packages combine the old GNU fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages.

This update fixes the following bugs:

  • The "pr -c [filename]" and "pr -v [filename]" commands, which serve to show control and non-printing characters, cause the pr utility to terminate with a segmentation fault in multibyte locales. With this update, the underlying code has been modified and the pr utility now works as expected. (BZ#772172)

  • The "-Z" option of the ls command did not explain sufficiently that only the last format option is taken into consideration and the user did not understand why the "ls -Zl" and "ls -lZ" command returned a different output. With this update, the ls info documentation has been improved. (BZ#771843)

  • The "tail --follow" command uses the inotify API to follow the changes in a file. However, inotify does not work on remote file systems and the tail utility should fall back to polling for files on such file systems. The remote file systems GPFS and FhGFS were missing from the remote file system list and therefore "tail --follow" did not display the updates to the file on these file systems. These file systems have been added to the remote file system list and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#769874)

  • If SELinux was enabled, the "ls -l" command leaked one string for each non-empty directory name specified on the command line. With this update, such strings are freed from the memory and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#751974)

  • The su utility could remain unresponsive if it ran a process that ignored the SIG_CHLD signal. This happened because the su utility uses the waitpid() function to wait for a child process. The loop mechanism with the waitpid() function waited for the process to be in the stopped status. However, a process masking the SIG_CHLD signal will never be in that status. With this update, the loop mechanism was improved to handle this situation correctly and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#754057)

  • In a non-interactive tcsh shell, the colorls.csh script returned the following error:

    tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified

This happened because the tcsh shell did not short-circuit the evaluation of the logical AND in a colorls.csh expression. With this update, checking for an interactive shell has been modified and the script no longer returns the error message. (BZ#804604)

This update also adds the following enhancements:

  • In the default listing, the df utility showed long file system names including UUID. Consequently, the columns following the file system names were pushed to the right and made the df output hard to read. As long UUID system names are becoming more common, df now prints the referent when a long name refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified. (BZ#766461)

  • The user could not use octal digit mode when cleaning special set-user-id and set-group-id bits on a directory with the chmod tool. This is an upstream change, however as it was possible in all the previous Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, it is necessary to provide backwards compatibility. Therefore, the chmod tool now again allows the user to clear the special bits on the directories using octal digit mode if the octal digit mode is at least 5 digits long. (BZ#691466)

All users of coreutils are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

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 https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian6ppc64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6i386

Updated Packages

  • coreutils-libs-8.4-19.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • coreutils-libs-8.4-19.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-19.el6.i686.rpm
  • coreutils-8.4-19.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-19.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • coreutils-8.4-19.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • coreutils-libs-8.4-19.el6.i686.rpm
  • coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-19.el6.s390x.rpm
  • coreutils-8.4-19.el6.src.rpm
  • coreutils-libs-8.4-19.el6.s390x.rpm
  • coreutils-8.4-19.el6.s390x.rpm
  • coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-19.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • coreutils-8.4-19.el6.i686.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information