Coreutils; Rhba-2009:1262: Bug Fix Update - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5.4 - TECHNICAL NOTES Manual

Chapter 1. Package Updates
• Support for choosing between the Xen and KVM hypervisors for virtual machine services.
Users of conga are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which resolve these issues and
add these enhancements.

1.23. coreutils

1.23.1. RHBA-2009:1262: bug fix update

An updated coreutils package that fixes several bugs and adds various enhancements is now
available.
The coreutils package contains the core GNU utilities. It is the combination of the old GNU fileutils, sh-
utils, and textutils packages.
This updated package fixes the following bugs:
• previously, it was not possible to compile coreutils without SELinux support. This has been
fixed so that removing the "--enable-selinux" option from the spec file allows coreutils to compile
successfully. (BZ#488730
• 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#497368
• the "df" utility reports the disk usage of a directory within a file system. Using "df" on a directory
which contained autofs mount points under it did not cause autofs to mount those directories, which
resulted in "df" not factoring in the disk usage of those automount directories. With this update,
invoking the "df" command does trigger automount, which in turn results in a correct disk usage
172
count. (BZ#497830
• several other utilities in the coreutils package possessed undocumented options, which could have
led to user confusion. Those undocumented options have been removed from their respective
utilities, thus reducing the possibility for confusion.
• the "chmod", "chown" and "chgrp" commands all take the following options, which have the
same effect: "-f", "--silent" and "--quiet". These flags cause the command to suppress most error
messages. However, calling the command with one of these options on a non-existent file caued the
command to output the following message: "No such file or directory". These options now suppress
error messages when called on non-existent files.
• the tail(1) man page contained a formatting error and a typo, both of which have been rectified.
175
(BZ#470788 )
• the rm(1) man page stated that the "rm" command possessed a "--directory" ('-d') option, whose
purpose was to allow the removal of directories, including non-empty directories. However, invoking
"rm --directory [dir]" always resulted in the following error message: "rm: cannot remove `some_dir':
Is a directory". The rm(1) man page has been corrected and no longer lists "--directory" as an
option. The recommended switch for recursively removing a directory and its contents is "--
recursive" ('-r'). (BZ#473472
28
170
)
171
)
)
176
)
173
(BZ#468030 )
174
(BZ#474220 )