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Endless recursion in xdg-open due to incorrect handling of spaces in directory names

Submitted by Sophie Hirn

Assigned to Portland Bugs

Link to original bug (#109205)

Description

xdg-open can be brought to recurse endlessly into a crash with the following setup:

  1. Inside the search path for .desktop files, place a directory with name (e.g.) Grinding Gear Games

  2. Create a directory named Games in your home directory.

  3. Create a subdirectory named Grinding Gear Games somewhere inside the ~/Games directory.

Now, running e.g. xdg-open https://en.wikipedia.org from your home directory will result in an endless recursion and inevitable crash.

I've already found the offending line, it's scripts/xdg-open.in:330, which reads for d in $dir/*/; do.

The spaces in the directory name mentioned above lead the search into ~/Games due to improper space handling, and the directory ~/Games/<...>/Grinding Gear Games makes the search go back to ~/Games again.

However, I haven't found a POSIX-compliant way of fixing the problem without restructuring the entire function yet, all my attempts relied either on bash-specific behaviour or GNU extensions to find.