Issued:

2015-07-22

Updated:

2015-07-22

RHBA-2015:1450 - ksh bug fix update

Synopsis

ksh bug fix update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated ksh packages that fix several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

KornShell (KSH) is a Unix shell developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories, which is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) and includes many features of the C shell. The most recent version is KSH-93. KornShell complies with the POSIX.2 standard (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992).

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Prior to this update, the result of a command substitution was lost if a file descriptor used for the substitution was previously explicitly closed. With this update, ksh no longer reuses file descriptors that were closed during the execution of a command substitution. Now, command substitutions work as expected in the described situation. (BZ#1116072)

• Previously, ksh in some cases terminated unexpectedly when re-setting a trap inside a function. With this update, ksh no longer uses invalid data for trap pointers and does not crash in this situation. (BZ#1117404)

• After the user changed into a directory that lacked execution permissions, ksh did not recognize that the change did not happen and that the user was instead still operating in the directory from which the user attempted to change. Also, the "pwd" utility incorrectly displayed the directory into which the user attempted to change instead of the directory in which the user was actually operating. This update modifies ksh to verify whether the directory change was successful. As a result, ksh reports an error if the necessary execution permissions are missing. (BZ#1160923)

• Previously, ksh sometimes incorrectly initialized a variable holding the path of the working directory. If a program changed the working directory between forking and ksh execution, then ksh could contain an incorrect value in the working directory variable. With this update, initialization of the working directory variable has been corrected, and ksh now contains the correct value in the aforementioned situation. (BZ#1168611)

• A nested associative array contained an unexpected extra empty value after the array was initialized. This update fixes a bug in the associative array initialization code that was causing this problem. As a result, newly-created nested associative arrays are empty as expected. (BZ#1173668)

• Previously, ksh terminated unexpectedly after an alarm occurred during a read operation with a modified Internal Field Separator (IFS). The ksh alarm built-in has been modified to preserve the IFS table during execution. As a result, ksh no longer crashes in this situation. (BZ#1176670)

• When the user set the export attribute to a variable, ksh in certain cases ignored some other variable attributes. For example, when the user set a variable to be both exported and upper-case, ksh did not set the upper-case option correctly. The typeset utility code has been fixed to respect all options that the user sets for a variable. As a result, ksh sets all attributes correctly even if the user sets multiple attributes simultaneously. (BZ#1188377)

• Previously, after the user unset an associative array, the system did not free the newly-available memory. Consequently, ksh consumed more and more memory over time. The underlying source code has been modified to free the memory after the user unsets an associative array, thus fixing this problem. (BZ#1189294)

Users of ksh are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs.

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

• ksh-20120801-28.el6.i686.rpm
• ksh-20120801-28.el6.s390x.rpm
• ksh-20120801-28.el6.ppc64.rpm
• ksh-20120801-28.el6.x86_64.rpm
• ksh-debuginfo-20120801-28.el6.x86_64.rpm
• ksh-20120801-28.el6.src.rpm
• ksh-debuginfo-20120801-28.el6.ppc64.rpm
• ksh-debuginfo-20120801-28.el6.s390x.rpm
• ksh-debuginfo-20120801-28.el6.i686.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 1116072
• This content is not included.BZ - 1117404
• This content is not included.BZ - 1138751
• This content is not included.BZ - 1147645
• This content is not included.BZ - 1168611
• This content is not included.BZ - 1173668
• This content is not included.BZ - 1176670
• This content is not included.BZ - 1189294
• This content is not included.BZ - 1204111

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.