GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.19 released (fixes sort -u data loss bugs)

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coreutils-8.19 released (fixes sort -u data loss bugs)

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Mon 20 Aug 2012 08:13:40 AM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.19, a stable release.

There have been 13 commits by 4 people in the 8 days since 8.18.

This release is primarily to fix two data loss bugs in sort -u.
See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

Bernhard Voelker (1)
Jim Meyering (9)
Krzysztof Goj (1)
Paul Eggert (2)

Special thanks to Rasmus Borup Hansen for reporting the sort -u problem along with a reproducer, and to Paul Eggert for spotting the second bug and for his minimal patch that fixed both bugs.

Jim [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]

GNU coreutils home page

For a summary of changes and contributors, see the gitweb shortlog or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:

git shortlog v8.18..v8.19

To summarize the 9 gnulib-related changes, run these commands from a git-cloned coreutils directory:

git checkout v8.19
git submodule summary v8.18

Download

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:

or use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify coreutils-8.19.tar.xz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:

Autoconf 2.69.19-1bb10
Automake 1.12a
Gnulib v0.0-7581-gbc33a8a
Bison 2.6.2.837-8dfc

NEWS

Bug fixes

df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines. For example, this command would fail to print "1": (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

sort -u could read freed memory [also introduced in coreutils-8.6]. For example, this command evokes a read from freed memory:

perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u

New features

rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories. This improves compatibility with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.