less: double free or corruption (fasttop)

[Stephan Feder]

When I watch a certain string in less

# less <<<'- xxxxxxxxx 0 2015-10-03 12:50 13:45 xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx+'

and then type '/' and enter the search string

^[+-] ......... . 2015-(09-(2[x]|x[0-1])|10-0[2-3]) .*$

I get

*** Error in `less': double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x56af6c58 ***
Aborted

-- System Information:
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description: Raspbian GNU/Linux 8.0 (jessie)
Release: 8.0
Codename: jessie
Architecture: armv7l

Kernel: Linux 4.1.7-v7+ (SMP w/4 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_DK.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_DK.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages less depends on:
ii debianutils 4.4
ii libc6 2.19-18+deb8u1
ii libtinfo5 5.9+20140913-1

less recommends no packages.

less suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

[Rune Sætre (rune-at-ubuntu-one)]

Hi

I usually build less myself from the debian stable sources. That always works. I do this by running "apt-get source less" on a PC running debian stable, copying the downloaded files to my raspbian machines and running "dpkg-buildpackage" in the extracted source directory.

The latest version I did this with was version 481-2.1 from Debian stable, which included these files:

'http://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/less/less_481-2.1.dsc' less_481-2.1.dsc 1763 SHA256:3e06ad6e17627f4996bf301112fd2bfb332ab915acfaa7f41b7917a0460cf358
'http://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/less/less_481.orig.tar.gz' less_481.orig.tar.gz 316622 SHA256:3fa38f2cf5e9e040bb44fffaa6c76a84506e379e47f5a04686ab78102090dda5
'http://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/less/less_481-2.1.debian.tar.xz' less_481-2.1.debian.tar.xz 19192 SHA256:4cbaafa1c6d59eb7c2e6a5adef133403a80e57b892198462a6a304deb4b47bd8

The raspbian version of less have not worked properly for me for years. It dies from the double free problem for all but the most trivial regex searches. The latest Raspbian package to date that exhibits this problem is less version 458-3.

Could not this problem be fixed by simply using the same version of less that Debian stable is currently using?

Regards
Rune

[peter green (plugwash)]

As far as I can tell all Raspbian releases have the same version of less as the corresponding Debian releases.

Rune, have you tried the package from Raspbian stretch?