RHBA-2009:1262 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated coreutils package that fixes several bugs and adds various
enhancements is now available.

Description

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

This updated package fixes the following bugs:

• previously, it was not possible to compile coreutils without SELinux

support. This has been fixed so that removing the "--enable-selinux" option
from the spec file allows coreutils to compile successfully. (BZ#488730)

• the "join" utility, which joins two text files, or a file and standard

input, on a line-by-line basis, could experience a segmentation fault when
running under a multibyte locale. In addition, multibyte locales could
cause "join" to produce unexpected results. With this updated package,
these coding errors have been corrected so that "join" completes correctly
and successfully when run under a multibyte locale. (BZ#497368)

• the "df" utility reports the disk usage of a directory within a file

system. Using "df" on a directory which contained autofs mount points under
it did not cause autofs to mount those directories, which resulted in "df"
not factoring in the disk usage of those automount directories. With this
update, invoking the "df" command does trigger automount, which in turn
results in a correct disk usage count. (BZ#497830)

• several other utilities in the coreutils package possessed undocumented

options, which could have led to user confusion. Those undocumented options
have been removed from their respective utilities, thus reducing the
possibility for confusion. (BZ#468030)

• the "chmod", "chown" and "chgrp" commands all take the following options,

which have the same effect: "-f", "--silent" and "--quiet". These flags
cause the command to suppress most error messages. However, calling the
command with one of these options on a non-existent file caued the command
to output the following message: "No such file or directory". These options
now suppress error messages when called on non-existent files. (BZ#474220)

• the tail(1) man page contained a formatting error and a typo, both of

which have been rectified. (BZ#470788)

• the rm(1) man page stated that the "rm" command possessed a "--directory"

('-d') option, whose purpose was to allow the removal of directories,
including non-empty directories. However, invoking "rm --directory [dir]"
always resulted in the following error message: "rm: cannot remove
`some_dir': Is a directory". The rm(1) man page has been corrected and no
longer lists "--directory" as an option. The recommended switch for
recursively removing a directory and its contents is "--recursive" ('-r').
(BZ#473472)

• the coreutils package's locale directories were not owned by the

coreutils package. This has been corrected by ensuring that all locale
directories are owned by the package. (BZ#481804)

In addition, this updated package provides the following enhancements:

• the '-v' option of the "ls" command sorts directory listings based upon

version numbers. However, "ls -v" did not sort vmlinuz-[version] files from
the /boot/ directory in the correct order. This updated coreutils package
enhances both "ls -v" and "sort -V" so that they are now able to sort
/boot/vmlinuz-[version] files correctly. (BZ#253817)

• the "install" command now supports the "--compare" ('-c') flag, which

causes "install" to compare each pair of source and destination files and,
if the destination file's content is identical to the source (and
disregarding any discrepancy between the owner, group, permissions and
possibly SELinux context) then the destination file is not modified and the
modification time is left unchanged. (BZ#453447)

• the "cp" and "mv" utilities now support the preservation of extended

attributes on files and directories. In addition, Access Control Lists
(ACLs) are now preserved when copying or moving files (with "cp" or "mv")
to or from NFSv4-mounted file systems. (BZ#454072)

All coreutils users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which
resolves these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 253817 - The -v option of ls does not handle /boot version numbers properly
• BZ - 454072 - RHEL 5.1 - cp and chmod don't respect NFSv4 ACLs
• BZ - 470788 - man tail, section POSIX2_VERSION
• BZ - 473472 - rm -d broken
• BZ - 474220 - Behavior change for 'chmod -f' between rhel3 and rhel4/rhel5
• BZ - 496143 - new mv xattr-preservation behavior can be very noisy ....
• BZ - 497368 - Utility join could segfault due to multibyte patch
• BZ - 497830 - 'df' doesn't wait for automount with indirect maps that use browse option

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)