bug#26253: Coreutils 8.26 test failure on arm-linux-gnueabihf

[Ludovic Courtès]

In current ‘core-updates’ (7fdca77e007f0838ecd32b044827678f2b345ff0),
tests/misc/cut-huge-range.sh in Coreutils 8.26 fails reproducibly in the
chroot build environment; it succeeds outside of it.

When it fails, cut-huge-range.log shows this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
+ CUT_MAX=4294967294
+ ulimit -v 3004
+ cut -b4294967294- /dev/null
+ ulimit -v 3004
+ cut -b1-4294967294 /dev/null
+ ulimit -v 3004
+ returns_ 1 cut -b4294967295 /dev/null
+ fail=1
+ ulimit -v 3004
+ returns_ 1 cut -b4294967296 /dev/null
+ fail=1
+ compare /dev/null err
+ compare_dev_null_ /dev/null err
+ test 2 = 2
+ test x/dev/null = x/dev/null
+ test -s err
+ return 0
+ return 0
+ Exit 1
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

So the two lines that fail are these:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
# Explicitly disallow values above CUT_MAX
(ulimit -v $vm && returns_ 1 cut -b$SIZE_MAX /dev/null 2>/dev/null) || fail=1
(ulimit -v $vm && returns_ 1 cut -b$SIZE_OFLOW /dev/null 2>/dev/null) || fail=1
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I don’t understand why at this point, but I found that removing
“2>/dev/null” from these two lines lets the test pass (and AIUI, this
redirection is not necessary for the test; it just hides the

  cut: byte/character offset '4294967296' is too large
  
error message.)

I’ve tried to reduce the test case to facilitate debugging, to no
avail.

To be continued!

Ludo’.