Broken setting custom flags in /usr/bin/chromium-browser script

[Mikhail Novosyolov]

To workaround LP#1808853 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1808853) I tried to make the following script (/etc/chromium-browser/customizations/20-chromium-useragent-fix):

https://gitlab.com/mikhailnov/nastr/blob/master/chromium-useragent-fix.sh

But it does not work due to probably an error in /usr/bin/chromium-browser

If use an unmodified /usr/bin/chromium-browser, then my scripts leads to openning multiple tabs, because --useagent=VALUE is passed as multiple arguements, not one.

I've made a patch:
--- ./chromium-browser 2018-12-17 04:53:00.000000000 +0300
+++ /tmp/chromium-browser 2018-12-19 14:16:29.186960503 +0300
@@ -207,16 +207,16 @@
   echo "$GDB $LIBDIR/$APPNAME -x $tmpfile"
   $GDB "$LIBDIR/$APPNAME" -x $tmpfile
   if [ $want_temp_profile -eq 1 ] ; then
- rm -rf $TEMP_PROFILE
+ rm -rf ${TEMP_PROFILE:?}/*
   fi
   exit $?
 else
   if [ $want_temp_profile -eq 0 ] ; then
- exec $LIBDIR/$APPNAME $CHROMIUM_FLAGS "$@"
+ exec "$LIBDIR/$APPNAME" "$CHROMIUM_FLAGS" "$@"
   else
     # we can't exec here as we need to clean-up the temporary profile
- $LIBDIR/$APPNAME $CHROMIUM_FLAGS "$@"
- rm -rf $TEMP_PROFILE
+ "$LIBDIR/$APPNAME" "$CHROMIUM_FLAGS" "$@"
+ rm -rf ${TEMP_PROFILE:?}/*
   fi
 fi

After this multiple pages are not openned, but, if we run
$ bash -x /usr/bin/chromium-browser
we see:
+ exec /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser ' --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=32.0.0.101 --user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36 --enable-pinch' https://yandex.ru/internet

the problem is in ' ', new user-agent is not applied

If to run manually
$ /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=32.0.0.101 --user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36 --enable-pinch https://yandex.ru/internet

then setting a custom useragent does work.

What can be done?

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Please let me know if I misunderstood and this isn't a duplicate.