Upgrading glibc

Question

I just read here that there is security bug in glibc and that it is already fixed.

I found out, that the actual installed version of glibc can be shown by ldd --version. My systems runs version 2.19.

So I want now to upgrade it but I don't know how to do so. (I don't want to upgrade the whole system). I tried to find out which package contains glibc with apt-cache search glibc. But there are hundred of packages...

So does anybody know how to find out the package which I need to upgrade to get the new version of glibc?

Solution

As j0h described, I was able to solve my problem. Here is what I have done:

1. I read at Wikipedia about glibc. Glibc (better known as GNU C Library) has a fork for linux which is called libc6. Libc6 is available via apt.
2. Run apt-get update to update the database.
3. Use apt-cache policy libc6 to find out the installed version and the candidate version, whereas the installed version can be also shown with ldd --version.
4. Install the new candidate version with apt-get install libc6
5. Check the new version again by doing step 3 again to see your success.

Comments

[Admin]

did you try sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade ?

[Admin]

glibc is the package. you could look at apt-cache search glibc then see glibc-source, and do apt-cache policy glibc-source which would tell your upgrade candidate version. Alternatively, you might mean libc6.

[packetie]

Thanks for the answer! In step 4, it should be apt-get install libc6, I think it was a typo there.

[jxramos]

if my candidate is the same as my current would that mean to move further beyond my glibc version it would necessitate an upgrading to ubuntu as a whole?

[eDeviser]

@jxramos Yes this could be. Which version of Ubuntu are you running and did you perform the step number two?