Re: heap corruption in du

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Mikulas Patocka <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I got this message from du from coreutils 5.2.1:
> >
> > du: fts_read failed: No such file or directory
> > *** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0x0806c390 ***
> >
> > I was sometimes able reproduce on an AFS filesystem. It turned out that
> > AFS filesystem changes inode numbers or device numbers, so
> > fts_safe_changedir called at the end of fts_read fails. fts_read sets
> > FTS_STOP, returns NULL and lets fts_cur to point to just freed entry few
> > lines above (free(tmp)). The next call to fts_close will do a double-free.
> >
> > This patch fixes the problem in this situation (and other possible
> > scenarios resulting from various syscalls failing) --- however you should
> > better go through the whole code for handling of fts tree and check it.
>
> Thanks for the report and patch.
> That bug was fixed almost exactly a year ago (see the 1.20->1.21 delta
> of fts.c for a slightly different change).
>
> The latest test release is here:
>  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.90.tar.gz
>  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.90.tar.bz2

BTW. How stable are alpha versions of GNU software from this server? Do 
you think they are OK for a production multiuser machine?

Shouldn't new regular non-alpha version be made for these kind of fixes? 
--- on my server, du runs every night to count users' used space --- if 
users can corrupt its memory by moving directories around and changing 
parent's inode number, it can be even a security hole.

Mikulas

> Or check it out from CVS:
>  http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=coreutils