Bug in Locale based floating point formatting code

Last changed 5. Dec 1996

Description

There is a bug in the Locale-based floating point formatting code in the C library distributed with Unifix Linux 2.0. The bug shows itself if a format like e.g. "%'f" is used to format floating point numbers where the number of leading digits is a multiple of the grouping. The bug has been shown by Harald Schreiber (Harald.Schreiber@post.rwth-aachen.de) in a news article.

Effect

The leading digit is duplicated, which leads to a wrong number.

Fix

Install the new C library. Get the patch http://www.unifix.de/support/patches/patch-2.0.0.1.cpio , and run (as root) swinstall -s patch-2.0.0.1.cpio .

Workaround

Use the POSIX locale or another locale that does not use thousands-separators. Do this by setting the environment variable LC_NUMERIC to POSIX

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