I was just in the process of writing David Fernandez Gonzalez an Email about this problem when I came across this ticket.
I can confirm this problem on Ubuntu 18.04.6. My 20.x machines did not get the update, so I cannot verify on other releases: Unpacking cron (3.0pl1-128.1ubuntu1.1) over (3.0pl1-128.1ubuntu1) ... Setting up cron (3.0pl1-128.1ubuntu1.1) ... stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory Warning: * is not a regular file! Every single sysadmin should be concerned. ANY TIME we see asterisk wildcards being used in this fashion, where [ or test operators are behaving in this manner, we have reason to become concerned. To me, this smells of a shell script trying to parse crontab entries, which is inherently dangerous. I am now questioning whether or not this postinst script potentially nuked something it shouldn't have. How this was missed is beyond me. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to cron in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1971895 Title: Warning messages from stat printed on installation with no user crontabs Status in cron package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: On installation of cron on a new system, or (I expect) an upgrade with no user crontab files the following is printed: Setting up cron (3.0pl1-128.1ubuntu1.1) ... stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory stat: cannot stat '*': No such file or directory Warning: * is not a regular file! This is related to the fix for CVE-2017-9525 introduced in 3.0pl1-128.1ubuntu1.1. The for loop at line 66 of cron.postinst needs to have a guard like the following added to it: [ "$tab_name" = "*" ] && continue We have observed this with Bionic, I haven't checked any other Ubuntu releases. Cheers, Andrew To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/1971895/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
