RHBA-2012:0933 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated coreutils packages that fix several bugs and add two enhancements are
now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The coreutils packages contain the core GNU utilities. These packages combine
the old GNU fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• The "pr -c [filename]" and "pr -v [filename]" commands, which serve to show

control and non-printing characters, cause the pr utility to terminate with a
segmentation fault in multibyte locales. With this update, the underlying code
has been modified and the pr utility now works as expected. (BZ#772172)

• The "-Z" option of the ls command did not explain sufficiently that only the

last format option is taken into consideration and the user did not understand
why the "ls -Zl" and "ls -lZ" command returned a different output. With this
update, the ls info documentation has been improved. (BZ#771843)

• The "tail --follow" command uses the inotify API to follow the changes in a

file. However, inotify does not work on remote file systems and the tail utility
should fall back to polling for files on such file systems. The remote file
systems GPFS and FhGFS were missing from the remote file system list and
therefore "tail --follow" did not display the updates to the file on these file
systems. These file systems have been added to the remote file system list and
the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#769874)

• If SELinux was enabled, the "ls -l" command leaked one string for each

non-empty directory name specified on the command line. With this update, such
strings are freed from the memory and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#751974)

• The su utility could remain unresponsive if it ran a process that ignored the

SIG_CHLD signal. This happened because the su utility uses the waitpid()
function to wait for a child process. The loop mechanism with the waitpid()
function waited for the process to be in the stopped status. However, a process
masking the SIG_CHLD signal will never be in that status. With this update, the
loop mechanism was improved to handle this situation correctly and the problem
no longer occurs. (BZ#754057)

• In a non-interactive tcsh shell, the colorls.csh script returned the following

error:

tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified

This happened because the tcsh shell did not short-circuit the evaluation of the
logical AND in a colorls.csh expression. With this update, checking for an
interactive shell has been modified and the script no longer returns the error
message. (BZ#804604)

This update also adds the following enhancements:

• In the default listing, the df utility showed long file system names including

UUID. Consequently, the columns following the file system names were pushed to
the right and made the df output hard to read. As long UUID system names are
becoming more common, df now prints the referent when a long name refers to a
symlink, and no file systems are specified. (BZ#766461)

• The user could not use octal digit mode when cleaning special set-user-id and

set-group-id bits on a directory with the chmod tool. This is an upstream
change, however as it was possible in all the previous Red Hat Enterprise Linux
releases, it is necessary to provide backwards compatibility. Therefore, the
chmod tool now again allows the user to clear the special bits on the
directories using octal digit mode if the octal digit mode is at least 5 digits
long. (BZ#691466)

All users of coreutils are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

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

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

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

Fixes

• BZ - 691466 - [RFE] Enable octal-digit mode for removal of UID/GID/sticky bits
• BZ - 751974 - ls -l / memory leaks
• BZ - 769874 - tail: fix --follow on FhGFS remote file systems
• BZ - 771843 - Better document ls behaviour for formatting options('ls -Zl' and 'ls -lZ' show different results)
• BZ - 772172 - pr command failed on multibyte test
• BZ - 804604 - Error in /etc/profile.d/colorls.csh

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)