671397 - Firefox fails to start with "Couldn't load XPCOM." under certain conditions

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 670788

(Core :: XPCOM, defect)

Description

[Chris Coulson]

On current nightly and aurora builds, Firefox will fail to start with "Couldn't load XPCOM" under these conditions:

1) The executable is loaded from the users PATH,
...and...
2) There is a file called "firefox" in the current working directory

This is because if you pass a relative path to realpath, it will resolve the path if the file exists in the current working directory. This causes mozilla::BinaryPath::Get() to return the wrong path.

This was reported to https://launchpad.net/bugs/809384 by Ben, who experienced this because he has a folder named "firefox" in his home directory. This is enough to prevent a current aurora build from starting

Comment 1

[Chris Coulson]

Attachment: Don't call realpath when loaded from PATH

This fixes it by not calling realpath() if we are executed from the users PATH. This is determined by the absence of any separators in argv[0]. I did consider also checking that the result is actually an executable file too, but that seemed overkill.