### Please describe the problem. The shim for the standalone version of git annex invokes the dynamic linker with --library-path set appropriately. glibc's parsing of library-path treats : and ; as separators and has no quoting syntax for those characters. Also path items have to be absolute paths so you can't avoid having the whole path. As a result if you install the standalone version in a directory whose path includes either of those characters it will produce a library-path that's interpreted incorrectly leading to it looking for the libraries in the wrong place and potentially eventually using the system's installed versions if they are available. ### What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Find a system with as few libraries installed as possible. libnettle.so.6 is an easy one to avoid. 2. create a directory called 'test;test' 3. install git annex standalone in 'test;test' 4. use the standalone git annex to do a 'git annex get' 5. there will be an error saying it can't find libnettle.so.6 ### What version of git-annex are you using? On what operating system? This bug applies to any version. with a ':' it will probably occur on any unix, with a ';' it will occur on at least Linux and Solaris. ### Please provide any additional information below. This bug can't be fixed. It's unlikely to trip people up but might with a bad combination of label-based drive mounting and odd drive labels. The worst case would be incompatible libraries on the system install which could lead to data corruption. I recommend that the git annex shim should check for ':' or ';' in the path and exit non-zero if they are found. [[!format sh """ # If you can, paste a complete transcript of the problem occurring here. # If the problem is with the git-annex assistant, paste in .git/annex/daemon.log jdamery-iabak@oklina:/mnt/iabak-ext;/IA.BAK/shard9$ PATH=../git-annex.linux/:$PATH git annex get prelinger_library/11annualreport00unitrich/11annualreport00unitrich_raw_jp2.zip get prelinger_library/11annualreport00unitrich/11annualreport00unitrich_raw_jp2.zip (from web...) /mnt/iabak-ext;/IA.BAK/git-annex.linux/shimmed/wget/wget: error while loading shared libraries: libnettle.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Unable to access these remotes: web Try making some of these repositories available: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001 -- web failed git-annex: get: 1 failed # End of transcript or log. """]] > Actually, this bug is fixable. And I have! I made it detect the problem > path, and then fall back to making a directory in /tmp, symlinking the > git-annex.linux directory into it, and using that as its base directory. > > Of course, that's a suboptimal configuration, but better than having some > configurations where it doesn't work. [[done]] --[[Joey]]