RHBA-2009:1652 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated acl packages that fix a bug are now available.

Description

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are used to define finer-grained discretionary
access rights for files and directories. The acl packages contain the
getfacl and setfacl utilities needed for manipulating access control lists.

This update fixes the following bug:

• the "setfacl" command, which sets the access control lists for files,

always returned an exit status of 0, even when the command failed and
printed out error messages. With this update, setfacl exits with the
correct exit status upon failure. (BZ#368451)

• running "setfacl -- --test" caused setfacl to segmentation fault. This

has been fixed in this update. (BZ#430458)

• running the "setfacl" command with the '-P' flag, which is the short form

of the '--physical' option, which is supposed to cause "setfacl" to skip
over any symbolic links it encounters, did not work as expected: symbolic
links were still followed. This update fixes this so that the '-P' flag
works as expected and symbolic links are silently skipped over. (BZ#436070)

• the "setfacl" command failed to resolve relative symbolic links when it

encountered them unless they were specified with a trailing forward-slash
character (in the case of relative symbolic links to directories), or the
script or shell prompt's working directory was the directory which
contained the relative symbolic link(s). With this update, relative
symbolic links are handled correctly by setfacl regardless of where they
are encountered or what their target is. (BZ#500095)

• the "getfacl" and "setfacl" commands did not properly handle non-ASCII

characters with the result that calling either command on a system with the
correct locale settings still produced incorrect output, such as octal
character representations. With this update, getfacl and setfacl are now
able to produce correct output when using non-ASCII character sets.
(BZ#507747)

All users of Access Control Lists should upgrade to these updated packages,
which resolve this issue.

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 - 368451 - setfacl returns 0 even though it fails
• BZ - 430458 - execute command "setfacl -- --test" will occur Segmentation Fault
• BZ - 436070 - execute command "setfacl" with option "-P" can not skip symbolic link
• BZ - 500095 - setfacl fails to correctly resolve relative symlinks to directories

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)