Issued:

2014-10-13

Updated:

2014-10-13

RHBA-2014:1457 - coreutils bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

coreutils bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory (none)

Topic

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

Description

The coreutils packages contain the core GNU utilities. It is a combination of the old GNU fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, the "df" command did not display target device information when a symbolic link was specified as a parameter. Consequently, the information about the file was shown instead of the information about the device. This update applies a patch to fix this bug and the "df" command works as expected in the described scenario. (BZ#812449)

• When no user was specified, the "id -G" and "groups" commands printed the default group ID listed in the password database. Consequently, the IDs were in certain cases ineffective or incorrect. With this update, the commands have been enhanced to print only proper IDs, thus showing correct information about the groups. (BZ#1016163)

• A previous update of the coreutils packages fixed the tail utility to handle symbolic links correctly. However, due to this update, tail returned unnecessary warnings about reverting to polling. This update provides a patch to fix this bug and the warning is only shown when necessary. (BZ#1046818)

• A recent update of the coreutils packages changed the format of the output from the "df" and "df -k" commands to one line per entry, which is required for POSIX mode. As a consequence, scripts relying on the previous two lines per entry format started to fail. To fix this bug, two-line entries have been reintroduced to the output for modes other than POSIX. As a result, scripts relying on the two-line format no longer fail. (BZ#1057026)

• A recent update of the coreutils packages caused a regression in the signal handling in the su utility. As a consequence, when the SIGTERM signal was received, a parent process was killed instead of the su process. With this update, handling of the SIGTERM signal has been fixed and su no longer kills the parent process upon receiving the termination signal. (BZ#1063887)

• The chcon(1) manual page did not describe the default behavior when dereferencing symbolic links; the "--dereference" option was not documented. This update adds the appropriate information to the manual page. (BZ#1064621)

• Certain file systems, for example XFS, have special features such as speculative preallocation of memory holes. These features could cause a failure of the "dd" command test in the upstream test suite. As a consequence, the coreutils package source rpm could not be rebuilt on XFS file systems. To address this bug, the test has been improved to prevent the failures in the described scenario. (BZ#1075679)

• 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 is supposed to fall back to polling for files on such file systems. Previously, the Veritas file system was missing from the remote file system list and therefore, "tail --follow" did not display the updates to the file on this file system. The Veritas file system has been added to the remote file system list and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#1104244)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancement:

• This update enhances the "dd" command to support the count_bytes input flag. When the flag is specified, the count is treated as numbers of bytes rather than blocks. This feature is useful for example when copying virtual disk images. (BZ#1098078)

Users of coreutils are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add this enhancement.

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/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• coreutils-libs-8.4-37.el6.i686.rpm
• coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-37.el6.i686.rpm
• coreutils-8.4-37.el6.x86_64.rpm
• coreutils-8.4-37.el6.i686.rpm
• coreutils-libs-8.4-37.el6.ppc64.rpm
• coreutils-libs-8.4-37.el6.x86_64.rpm
• coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-37.el6.s390x.rpm
• coreutils-8.4-37.el6.src.rpm
• coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-37.el6.x86_64.rpm
• coreutils-debuginfo-8.4-37.el6.ppc64.rpm
• coreutils-8.4-37.el6.s390x.rpm
• coreutils-libs-8.4-37.el6.s390x.rpm
• coreutils-8.4-37.el6.ppc64.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 812449
• This content is not included.BZ - 1016163
• This content is not included.BZ - 1046818
• This content is not included.BZ - 1063887
• This content is not included.BZ - 1075679
• This content is not included.BZ - 1098078
• This content is not included.BZ - 1104244

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.