Bug#903931: zcat -t sometimes crashes with heap corruption

From	Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.bugs.rc
Subject	Bug#903931: zcat -t sometimes crashes with heap corruption
Date	2018-07-27 04:40 +0200
Message-ID	<wg0PD-2oR-3@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	<wcii6-89r-1@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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reopen 903931
severity 903931 wishlist
reassign 903931 initramfs-tools
retitle 903931 please use gzip instead of zcat in unmkinitramfs
thanks

Hi,

asking upstream about it, he sais:

"It seems that there are two ways of implementing *zcat programs out
there. The zcat from zutils is a complete implementation of a cat
program like the one from GNU coreutils[2] but with transparent
decompression. I have invested a lot of work to make it work well.

[2]
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/cat-invocation.html#cat-invocation

The rest of the *zcat programs out there seem to be just wrapper
scripts. The zcat from gzip boils down to 'exec gzip -cd "$@"'.

The problem, IMO, is in the xcpio() function of unmkinitramfs. It should
use 'gzip -t' instead of 'zcat -t', just as it already uses 'bzip2 -t'
and 'lzop -t'. Think that posix zcat does not document a -t option[3]
and therefore 'zcat -t' is not a portable way to check file integrity."

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/zutils-bug/2018-07/msg00001.html

Therefore, reassigning this back to initramfs-tools with the suggestion,
that you use gzip -t instead of zcat -t.

Regards,
Daniel

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Bug#903931: zcat -t sometimes crashes with heap corruption Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org> - 2018-07-27 04:40 +0200

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