Bug 44047

Summary: Setting $BROWSER=xdg-open can cause infinite loop
Product: Portland Reporter: Stephan Sokolow <freedesktop.zen.ssokolow>
Component: xdg-utilsAssignee: Portland Bugs <portland-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Stephan Sokolow 2011-12-22 03:07:33 UTC 
Some applications and scripts still use $BROWSER as their primary means of allowing user customization.

However, xdg-open makes no attempt to guard against self-calling when falling back to $BROWSER.

This makes it dangerous to set BROWSER=xdg-open in order to portably integrate older applications with GUI-based mechanisms for specifying the user's preferred browser.
Comment 1 Rex Dieter 2012-08-09 13:36:26 UTC 
I looked over the code, and while the possibility of hitting this case is small, it's not exactly zero either, so...

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/commit/?id=1d292e3cff57998be1a4e29369df5cbdcff154b2

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