fix(unikernels): reject single quotes in Linux init args - #898
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Anand-240
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This was referenced Aug 10, 2026
parseCmdLine() wrapped multi-word arguments in unescaped single quotes for urunit compatibility. An argument containing both a space and a single quote, for example sh -c "echo it's broken", produced an unbalanced quote sequence, corrupting the token-boundary parsing that urunit performs on /proc/cmdline and causing the guest init process to receive the wrong arguments. Since urunit's cmdline parser lives outside this repo and its escaping semantics are unknown, reject arguments containing a single quote with a clear error instead of guessing an escaping scheme. Fixes: urunc-dev#897 Signed-off-by: Anand-240 <anandprakashsrivastava68@gmail.com>
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Closing this since #897 was marked invalid. As I said on the issue, happy to follow your call on it. |
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Description
parseCmdLine() in pkg/unikontainers/unikernels/linux.go wraps
multi-word arguments in single quotes so urunit can recover argument
boundaries from the guest's boot cmdline. It does this with plain
string concatenation and does not escape quote characters already
present in the argument.
If an argument contains both a space and a single quote, for example
sh -c "echo it's broken", the wrap produces an unbalanced quote
sequence such as 'sh' 'echo it's broken', which corrupts the token
boundaries that urunit parses out of /proc/cmdline. The guest init
process can then receive the wrong arguments with no error surfaced to
the user.
Since urunit's own cmdline parser lives outside this repo and its
escaping rules are not known here, this change rejects arguments
containing a single quote with a clear error instead of guessing an
escaping scheme that might not match what urunit actually supports.
Related issues
Changes
error when an argument contains a single quote, before attempting to
wrap it.
covering the empty cmdline case, single word app, multi word
argument quoting, and the new rejection behavior for quoted
arguments.
How was this tested?
go test ./pkg/unikontainers/unikernels/... -run TestLinux -vpasses (5/5 subtests)go build ./pkg/unikontainers/unikernels/...succeedsLLM usage
Claude (Anthropic, model: claude-sonnet-5) was used to trace the
quoting bug and help put this fix together. Reviewed and tested by me
before opening this PR, per the project's LLM policy.
Checklist
make lint). Not run locally, nogolangci-lint setup available in this environment; deferring to CI.
locally; deferring to CI.