RHBA-2011:0230 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An updated coreutils package that fixes various bugs and adds an enhancement is
now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Description

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

This updated package fixes the following bugs:

• 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#497479)

• The "su" utility, which switches the user, does not return exit code of the

child process command, if the child process is terminated by a signal. Returned
exit code 0 - which means exit success - could be confusing for scripts. With
this updated package, correct exit code is returned, thus resolving the issue.
(BZ#565743)

• The "du" utility, which could be used for getting disk usage by some

directories, counts every hard link separately. This is not good way, as it
reports much higher disk usage space than is actually used. This updated package
counts hardlinked files only once, thus resolving the issue. (BZ#580249)

Additionally, this updated package adds the following enhancement:

• Although newer ISO images frequently use the SHA-256 algorithm for their

checksums, it was not easily possible to verify such checksums on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4. To target this issue, this updated package contains checksum
utilities for the whole SHA-2 family, allowing a user to count or verify
SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 sums. (BZ#493315)

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

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 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 493315 - FEAT: add sha256sum to coreutils
• BZ - 497479 - Utility join could segfault due to multibyte patch
• BZ - 580249 - du counts hardlinked files multiple times

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)