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Bug#736872: busybox: zcat does not decompress file which do not have a .gz suffix



28.01.2014 00:51, Ian Campbell wrote:
> Package: busybox
> Version: 1:1.22.0-2
> Severity: critical
> Justification: breaks the whole system
> 
> The zcat applet seems to behave like cat unless the input file has a .gz
> suffix:
> 
> Given two identical files (compressed string "Hello World"), one with a .gz
> suffix and one without:

Thank you for a very nice bugreport, and for further analysis.  Much apprecated.
(Initially I started bisecting and found the commit which inroduced the issue,
and immediately found two more emails from you, pointing to the fixes).

[]
> I've given this severity critical since it break the installer by breaking at
> least net-retriever.

Well, I disagree about the severity, but indeed, it breaks unrelated software.

So I prepared a new release (will upload in a few minutes) fixing this issue.

Uncortunately, this whole mess around compression introduces another issue.
After the 2 fixes for this bug, busybox zcat happily accepts uncompressed
input and behaves like regular cat, while original zcat refuses to accept
uncpmpressed input.  I reported this upstream.  But I think it is better
to accept and use uncompressed data than to fail to decompress compressed
data, and the current bug is indeed serious enough to have a quick fix.

Thank you!

/mjt


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