Issued:

2015-07-22

Updated:

2015-07-22

RHBA-2015:1407 - procps bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

procps bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

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

Description

The procps packages contain a set of system utilities that provide system information. The procps packages include the following utilities: ps, free, skill, pkill, pgrep, snice, tload, top, uptime, vmstat, w, watch, and pwdx.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, behavior of the libproc library was unreliable when it was loaded with the dlopen() call after the environment was changed with the setenv() call. As a consequence, an invalid memory access error could occur in libproc. With this update, the find_elf_note() function obtains the auxiliary vector values using a different and safer method based on parsing the /proc/self/auxv file, and the described problem no longer occurs. (BZ#1163404)

• Prior to this update, the stat2proc() function did not process empty files correctly. Consequently, when an empty stat file was processed, the ps utility could terminate unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. Handling of empty stat files has been fixed, and ps no longer crashes in this scenario. (BZ#1172059)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• This update introduces the new "--system" option to the sysctl utility. This option enables sysctl to process configuration files from a group of system directories. (BZ#1120580)

• The new "-h" option has been added to the "free" utility. The purpose of this option is to show all output fields automatically scaled to the shortest three-digit representation including the unit, making the output conveniently human-readable. (BZ#993072)

• The "w" utility now includes the "-i" option to display IP addresses instead of host names in the "FROM" column. (BZ#1123311)

Users of procps 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.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

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

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc64.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.s390x.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.i686.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.src.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.s390x.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.x86_64.rpm
• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc.rpm
• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.s390.rpm
• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.s390x.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc64.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.x86_64.rpm
• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.i686.rpm
• procps-debuginfo-3.2.8-33.el6.x86_64.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc64.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.i686.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.ppc.rpm
• procps-devel-3.2.8-33.el6.s390.rpm
• procps-3.2.8-33.el6.s390.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 1123311
• This content is not included.BZ - 1163404

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.