[Valgrind-developers] Trickiness with quoted arguments

[Nicholas N. <nj...@ca...>]

Hi,

I've found a problem with Valgrind's handling of quoted command line
arguments.  It's pretty obscure, I guess that's why nobody's complained
before.

Compare these two commands, with and without Valgrind:

[~/grind/massif] echo "foo -> bar" | sed -e 's/^.* -> /b/'
bbar
[~/grind/massif] echo "foo -> bar" | valgrind sed -e 's/^.* -> /b/'
==26593== Memcheck, a.k.a. Valgrind, a memory error detector for x86-linux.
==26593== Copyright (C) 2002-2003, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward.
==26593== Using valgrind-20030716, a program supervision framework for x86-linux.
==26593== Copyright (C) 2000-2003, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward.
==26593== Estimated CPU clock rate is 1404 MHz
==26593== For more details, rerun with: -v
==26593==
sed: -e expression #1, char 5: Unterminated `s' command
==26593==
==26593== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)
==26593== malloc/free: in use at exit: 4884 bytes in 3 blocks.
==26593== malloc/free: 44 allocs, 41 frees, 9247 bytes allocated.
==26593== For a detailed leak analysis,  rerun with: --leak-check=yes
==26593== For counts of detected errors, rerun with: -v

The problem is the spaces in the quoted string;  the string gets broken up
into 3 arguments;  this happens in the "valgrind" startup script.  I've
tried to stop this, fiddling with the quotes, using $* instead of $@, but
it's beyond my understanding of shell quoting rules.  Does anyone have any
suggestions?

Thanks.

N