[bug #30362] Unintuitively restrictive grub.cfg parsing (bracketing issue)

[Andreas Mohr]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?30362>

                 Summary: Unintuitively restrictive grub.cfg parsing
(bracketing issue)
                 Project: GNU GRUB
            Submitted by: andreasmohr
            Submitted on: Mon 05 Jul 2010 10:30:23 PM GMT
                Category: Configuration
                Severity: Major
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Software Error
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 
                 Release: 1.98
         Reproducibility: Every Time
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

Hello,

on a grub2 1.98-1 (provided by Debian unstable, installed to a USB stick),
I've been wondering for more than half an hour why some friggin' menuentry
kept throwing errors ("invalid command", "syntax error" etc. which got
displayed in very brief unhelpful flashes during bootup) and consequently did
not end up in the menu.

Turned out that the entire menuentry can be nuked by simply adding one space
too many after the closing bracket (i.e. one additional whitespace before the
newline char).

Sample (as pasted verbatim from
http://sidux.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=20371 , ending up
WITH problematic bogus whitespace at end despite NOT having it on the web
page, at least when using Swiftfox 3.6.3):

menuentry "sidux Moros 2009-04 KDE-lite" {
 loopback loop /boot/iso/sidux-2009-04-moros-kde-lite-i386-200912310312.iso
 linux (loop)/boot/vmlinuz0.686
fromiso=/boot/iso/sidux-2009-04-moros-kde-lite-i386-200912310312.iso boot=fll
noeject quiet debug=fll lang=de
 initrd (loop)/boot/initrd0.686
} 

This is NOT very helpful, since this means that any menuentry example pasted
from internet sources (web browser content) might easily end up with this
extra space due to mangling pasting.

As said above, this tiny syntax error took me ages to figure out.
IMHO grub2's parsing should be fixed to be less restrictive in such cases.

Thank you for an otherwise very promising (if still somewhat greenhornish ;)
bootloader!




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