This is a known bug triggered by fetching the data from a standard input. See <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1473368#c15>. There is no known fix.

A workaround is to pass the XML data from a file by a positional argument:

$ xpath -q -e '//*[text()="Regression"]/../../td/a/span/text()' /tmp/a.xml

It seems there is a bug in parse_stream() in Expat.xs.

The parse_stream() function allocates BUFSIZE-byte long output buffer. Then it reads a string using PerlIO's read() with a maximal string length tsiz=BUFSIZE characters into a temporary buffer. And then it retrieves length of the string in the temporary buffer in bytes and copies the strings from the temporary location to the output buffer:

  else {
    tbuff = newSV(0);
    tsiz = newSViv(BUFSIZE);
    buffsize = BUFSIZE;
  }

  while (! done)
    { 
      char *buffer = XML_GetBuffer(parser, buffsize);

      [...]
      else {
        int cnt;
        SV * rdres;
        char * tb;

        PUSHMARK(SP);
        EXTEND(SP, 3);
        PUSHs(ioref);
        PUSHs(tbuff);
        PUSHs(tsiz);
        PUTBACK ;

        cnt = perl_call_method("read", G_SCALAR);

        SPAGAIN ;

        if (cnt != 1)
          croak("read method call failed");

        rdres = POPs;

        if (! SvOK(rdres))
          croak("read error");

        tb = SvPV(tbuff, br);
        if (br > 0)
→         Copy(tb, buffer, br, char);
        else

While it works for byte-stream file handles, when using UTF-8 handles, length in bytes can be greater than length in characters, thus the temporary buffer can contain more bytes than the size of the output buffer and we have a buffer overwrite. This corrupts memory, especially metadata for glibc memory management and subsequent free() abort with "free(): invalid next size (normal)".

The input file has a non-ASCII character at 0x101C offset:

00001010  61 73 73 3d 22 6c 6f 67  69 6e 22 3e c2 a0 3c 61  |ass="login">..<a|

Created attachment 1514049 [details]
Proposed fix

I believe this patch fixes it.

How to test:

(1) Run the command from the description. Preferably under valgrind.
Before:
  Valgrind catches invalid write in parse_stream function in Expat.xs source file:
  $ valgrind -- perl /usr/bin/xpath -q -e '//*[text()="Regression"]/../../td/a/span/text()' <../a.xml 
==3998== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==3998== Copyright (C) 2002-2017, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==3998== Using Valgrind-3.14.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==3998== Command: perl /usr/bin/xpath -q -e //*[text()="Regression"]/../../td/a/span/text()
==3998== 
==3998== Invalid write of size 8
==3998==    at 0x4C38048: memmove (vg_replace_strmem.c:1271)
==3998==    by 0xD5425D5: memcpy (string_fortified.h:34)
==3998==    by 0xD5425D5: parse_stream (Expat.xs:390)
==3998==    by 0xD542B9A: XS_XML__Parser__Expat_ParseStream (Expat.xs:1475)
==3998==    by 0x4F26148: Perl_pp_entersub (in /usr/lib64/libperl.so.5.26.3)
==3998==    by 0x4F1DF94: Perl_runops_standard (in /usr/lib64/libperl.so.5.26.3)
==3998==    by 0x4E9DFAE: perl_run (in /usr/lib64/libperl.so.5.26.3)
==3998==    by 0x108EA9: ??? (in /usr/bin/perl)
==3998==    by 0x6059812: (below main) (in /usr/lib64/libc-2.28.so)
[...]
  The glibc SIGABORT happens quite often but not always.

After:
$ valgrind -- perl -Iblib/{lib,arch} /usr/bin/xpath -q -e '//*[text()="Regression"]/../../td/a/span/text()' <../a.xml 
==4000== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==4000== Copyright (C) 2002-2017, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==4000== Using Valgrind-3.14.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==4000== Command: perl -Iblib/lib -Iblib/arch /usr/bin/xpath -q -e //*[text()="Regression"]/../../td/a/span/text()
==4000== 
at_dt_iscsi_disk.positive_test.cold_plug.volume_disk.direct_source_mode
at_dt_iscsi_disk.positive_test.cold_plug.volume_disk.ipv6_host_source_mode
at_dt_iscsi_disk.positive_test.cold_plug.volume_disk.save_domain
at_dt_iscsi_disk.positive_test.hot_plug.volume_disk.ipv4_host_source_mode
at_dt_iscsi_disk.positive_test.hot_plug.volume_disk.snapshot_domain
iscsi.iscsi_test.normal_test.device_disk.auth_uuid.auth_place_in_source
iscsi.iscsi_test.normal_test.device_disk.iothread
multidisks.coldplug.multi_disks_test.disks_boot_nfs_pool
multipath.rawio_no.sgio_filtered.coldplug
multipath.rawio_no.sgio_filtered.hotplug
multipath.rawio_yes.sgio_filtered.coldplug
multipath.rawio_yes.sgio_filtered.hotplug
==4000== 
==4000== HEAP SUMMARY:
==4000==     in use at exit: 14,088,289 bytes in 30,479 blocks
==4000==   total heap usage: 233,042 allocs, 202,563 frees, 27,453,399 bytes allocated
==4000== 
==4000== LEAK SUMMARY:
==4000==    definitely lost: 60,103 bytes in 30 blocks
==4000==    indirectly lost: 14,013,620 bytes in 30,409 blocks
==4000==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==4000==    still reachable: 14,566 bytes in 40 blocks
==4000==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==4000== Rerun with --leak-check=full to see details of leaked memory
==4000== 
==4000== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==4000== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

I'm sorry, it's a wrong component. The bug and the fix belong to perl-XML-Parser (perl-XML-Parser-2.44-10.el8 is affected).