Product SiteDocumentation Site

1.18.  busybox

1.18.1.  RHBA-2009:1249: bug fix update

Updated busybox packages that resolve several issues are now available.
BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system. This package can also be useful for recovering from certain types of system failures.
These updated busybox packages provide fixes for the following bugs:
  • busybox provides a diff utility that is used extensively during installation. When this diff utility was called using the '-q' option, which reports only whether the files differ and not the details of how they differ, it always exited with an exit status of 0, indicating success. With this busybox update, the command "diff -q" correctly returns an exit status that corresponds to the same exit status returned when calling "diff" without the '-q' option, thus resolving the issue. (BZ#385661)
  • invoking the "uname -p" command resulted in the processor type being listed as "unknown" when it should have been listed, for example, as "x86_64", or "i686". With these updated packages, "uname -p" either prints the processor type if known, or, if it is unknown, then the command is silent. This behavior now corresponds to the behavior of the uname command in coreutils. (BZ#480105)
  • using BusyBox's rpm applet to install an rpm caused busybox to exit due to a segmentation fault caused by a memory corruption error. This has been fixed in these updated packages so that installing rpms using the "busybox rpm" command works as expected and does not fail with a segmentation fault. (BZ#466896)
  • the busybox packages also contained empty debuginfo packages. These have been removed from this update. (BZ#500547)
All users of busybox are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which resolve these issues.

Note: This documentation is provided {and copyrighted} by Red Hat®, Inc. and is released via the Open Publication License. The copyright holder has added the further requirement that Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. The CentOS project redistributes these original works (in their unmodified form) as a reference for CentOS-5 because CentOS-5 is built from publicly available, open source SRPMS. The documentation is unmodified to be compliant with upstream distribution policy. Neither CentOS-5 nor the CentOS Project are in any way affiliated with or sponsored by Red Hat®, Inc.