On 16/09/2026 05:05, Collin Funk wrote:
Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> writes:
There was a report that the change to quote output from env by default,
even if output is not a tty, caused some breakage:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/issues/355
Note the usage described there is non-robust,
and seems rare (no cases on debian codesearch)
and can be avoided by adding QUOTING_STYLE=literal etc.
Also When reviewing more cases on debian codesearch
there were many cases that were made more robust
with the current behavior of quoting.
So I'm 50:50 on reverting with the attached.
I'll leave it distill for a while longer at least.
I am conflicted as well. It still feels like an improvement, but it has
caused a few unforeseen breakages, which is concerning.
Note that I also see this affecting kwallet-pam [1]. It looks like they
were writing 'env' to a Unix socket and then kwalletd reads from it
using "fgets (buf, 1000, fp)" before using putenv [2]. That could enter
bogus variables into the environment if any of their values have
newlines. A large part of our rationale was trying to protect against
that.
However, since they depended on 'env' not being quoted, it breaks, which
is not our goal, of course.
Collin
[1] https://bugs.kde.org/525805
[2]
https://github.com/KDE/kde-runtime/blob/d765545023776ec49ae9bd183176014143fe15d3/kwalletd/main.cpp#L70-L98
Again non-robust operation,
But we're breaking too much here unfortunately.
So we'll probably need to revert to 9.11 behavior here.
Padraig
