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

 
 
Latest News
coreutils-9.4 released [stable] posted by pixelbeat, Tue 29 Aug 2023 03:16:59 PM UTC
coreutils-9.3 released [stable] posted by pixelbeat, Tue 18 Apr 2023 03:11:21 PM UTC
coreutils-9.2 released [stable] posted by pixelbeat, Mon 20 Mar 2023 03:53:57 PM UTC
coreutils-9.1 released [stable] posted by pixelbeat, Fri 15 Apr 2022 10:34:37 PM UTC
Subject: coreutils-9.0 released [stable] posted by pixelbeat, Fri 24 Sep 2021 01:55:23 PM UTC

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.

 

Back to the top

Powered by Savane 3.13-3230.
Corresponding source code