xdg-desktop-menu uninstall hangs if menu file names have spaces

[Mark Malakanov]

xdg-desktop-menu uninstall hangs if menu file names have spaces
for example when uninstalling a custom menu it hangs on processing "$HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine-Programs-Tina 9 - TI-Component Help.menu" file.

[Mgiuca-n (mgiuca-n)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a .desktop file with a vendor prefix and a space in the name. e.g., "foo-bar baz.desktop".
2. Run: xdg-desktop-menu install --mode user "foo-bar baz.desktop"

Expected result: The file is copied to "~/.local/share/applications/foo-bar baz.desktop".

Actual result:
xdg-desktop-menu: filename 'baz.desktop' does not have a proper vendor prefix
A vendor prefix consists of alpha characters ([a-zA-Z]) and is terminated
with a dash ("-"). An example filename is 'example-baz.desktop'
Use --novendor to override or 'xdg-desktop-menu --manual' for additional info.

This is because it thinks I am passing two separate filenames ("foo-bar" and "baz.desktop") even though I correctly used quotes on the command line. This is caused by line 998 of the script, which concatenates all arguments ending in .desktop onto $desktop_files, separating each argument with a space. After that point, it is impossible to tell which spaces separate arguments and which are part of the filename.

(Note that if all of the space-separated parts of the filename contain a "-", you don't see the above error, it just fails silently because it can't find the files it is trying to copy.)

[Martin von Gagern (gagern)]

Line 895 of the xdg-desktop-menu script passed a file name unquoted to grep:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/tree/scripts/xdg-desktop-menu?id=2baf6ae56f9b622ca51aa79ff370676aaef93908#n895

if grep 'generated and managed by xdg-desktop-menu' $menu_file > /dev/null 2> /dev/null; then

On my system I have a file name containing the sequence ' - ', which caused grep to read from stdin, with obscure side effects. I believe that the command should be something like this:

grep 'ge…nu' -- "$menu_file"

[Rdieter-math (rdieter-math)]

Since the "-" character is treated as special by
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html

I'd highly recommend .desktop files use it only to specify vendor as referenced in the spec above. Doing otherwise is just asking for trouble.

(While researching this more, there are many occurances of unquoted file access... fixing this potential problem fully will take some care).

[Rdieter-math (rdieter-math)]

Fixing this could get a little ugly... in the meantime I would simply and strongly recommend avoiding the use of .desktop filenames with spaces (converting " " to "_" or something...)

[Rdieter-math (rdieter-math)]

Fixed the immediate problem anyway, thanks,

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/commit/?id=c96d7b00aca3da1b608fde5827d7fea8785b3cd3

[Martin von Gagern (gagern)]

The desktop files in question were installed by Wine. They had the format
"wine-Programs-WindowsVendor-WindowsAppName.desktop"
i.e. "wine-" as vendor prefix, and then the directory structure inside the start menu encoded using "-" as structure separator. The way I read the spec you mentioned, that only specifies the part up to the first "-", i.e. "wine-". I can see no restriction on the part after that, although I might well have missed that.

In any case, even though I only had two instances of " - " inside desktop files, I had a not more containing spaces, so xdg-desktop-menu should be able to cope with these. Handling that single location is therefore a step in the right direction. Thanks for fixing this.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "patch" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[MestreLion (mestrelion)]

This affects more than just installing `.desktop` files. It also affects uninstalling *any* .directory file, with spaces or not, if `XDG_CONFIG_HOME/menus/applications-merged` contains a `.menu` file with spaces.

In this case, a simple `xdg-desktop-menu uninstall vendor-foo.directory vendor-bar.desktop` *freezes*. Notice there's no spaces in those names!

This was reported in Ubuntu as https://bugs.launchpad.net/xdg-utils/+bug/1432932 , and it contains a working patch that does not seem ugly: it simply quotes the vars as they should be.

"avoiding the use of .desktop filenames with spaces" is not always an option: wine creates such files, and they do so by design (its .menu files are named after their windows `.lnk` counterparts).

So if a user has wine-installed games, no other software will be able to uninstall its own .directory files!

Any chance this patch could be merged?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug has been fixed in that update, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xdg-utils/1.1.1-1ubuntu1