RHBA-2011:0171 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated psmisc package that fixes two bugs is now available for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The psmisc package contains utilities for managing processes on your system:
pstree, killall, fuser and peekfd. The pstree command displays a tree structure
of all of the running processes on your system. The killall command sends a
specified signal (SIGTERM if nothing is specified) to processes identified by
name. The fuser command identifies the PIDs of processes that are using
specified files or file systems. The peekfd command attaches to a running
process and intercepts all reads and writes to file descriptors.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Due to an error in memory allocation, an attempt to kill a process group by

using the "killall -g" command could fail. With this update, the memory
allocation has been corrected, and the killall utility now works as expected.
(BZ#668989)

• When parsing a list of command line arguments, the peekfd utility incorrectly

used a wrong index. As a result, running the peekfd command with a file
descriptor specified caused the utility to terminate unexpectedly with a
segmentation fault. This update corrects this error, and the peekfd utility no
longer fails to run. (BZ#668992)

All users of psmisc 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
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 668989 - uninitialized memory leading to `killall -g name ` failure
• BZ - 668992 - peekfd SIGSEGV

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)