Application fails to start when user's home folder contain certain characters

[fthevenet]

We recently received a report where an application launched via a JNLP file would failed to start for one user while it worked fine for others when using Icedtea-web 1.8 with OpenJDK 8 on Windows, while it was working for everyone when they used Oracle WebStart.
After investigation, the issue turned out to be that user for whom the application wouldn't start had an apostrophe in their home folder (e.g. C:\Users\Foo_O'Bar), which is a legal path on Windows, but that ITW code for crafting new paths for downloaded asset would incorrectly sanitize as C:\Users\Foo_O_Bar.
The application would then fail as it attempted to access content in C:\Users\Foo_O_Bar\... instead of C:\Users\Foo_O'Bar\...

I would like to propose a fix and I have opened PRs for both the 1.8 and master branches.

[janakmulani]

Hi

C:\IcedTeaWeb\WebStart\bin>javaws \owsfiles\Foo_O'Bar\AccessibleScrollDemo8.jnlp throws java.io.IOException: Cant create directory C:\Users\Foo_O_Bar\.cache\icedtea-web\cache\1.

However OpenWebStart works C:\OWS_1_11_1>javaws \owsfiles\Foo_O'Bar\AccessibleScrollDemo8.jnlp

[fthevenet]

Hello,
I'm afraid I don't quite follow you; are you confirming that the issue exists in Icetea-web, but that it doesn't happen in OpenWebStart?
I am not entirely knowledgeable about the relationship between ITW and OWS; does OWS consumes ITW as a dependency, or is it a downstream fork?
At any rate, this is the tracker for the ITW project, so it seems correct to report and propose a fix for this here, regardless of whether OWS is affected or not,, is it not?

Thanks

[janakmulani]

I confirm that the issue exists in ITW but it does not happen in OWS.

OWS does depend on ITW https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/IcedTea-Web

Sure this is a tracker for ITW and you are right to propose a fix here.

[fthevenet]

Thanks for the precisions, @janakmulani.
I'm looking forward to a review for #973

Thanks.