How to escape spaces in library path appended to LD_PRELOAD?

Question

I'm having a problem with LD_PRELOAD on Linux. I'm trying to load a library existing in a directory with spaces in its name, right before launching my application:

> export LD_PRELOAD='/home/myuser/MyApp\ Test/lib/mylib.so'

However, the path is not being taken properly. It gets split where the space exists, so it tries to preload these:

ERROR: ...: object '/home/myuser/MyApp' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored
ERROR: ...: object 'Test/lib/mylib.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored

I'm already escaping the space in 'MyApp Test'. What is the correct way to pass such path?

Edit: exporting without the escaped space as suggested, renders the same results:

export LD_PRELOAD='/home/myuser/MyApp Test/lib/mylib.so'

As well as (no quotes, just escaped space):

export LD_PRELOAD=/home/myuser/MyApp\ Test/lib/mylib.so

Answer 1

The dynamic loader is probably just doing a naive split on spaces, in which case it's impossible to get it to treat the space as part of your path.

You can work around it by creating a symlink to the library you want to preload that doesn't contain any spaces.

Edit:

confirmed by http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1142062

As other variables like PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, this variable may contain list of library names separated by colons. But... for compatibility with legacy systems it is possible to separate LD_PRELOAD elements by spaces. And older systems did not understand escaping so it turns out it is impossible to put full library paths into LD_PRELOAD if they contain spaces.

Answer 2

You can actually work around this by adding the path with spaces to LD_LIBRARY_PATH and then using LD_PRELOAD without the pathname. For example:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/myuser/MyApp\ Test/lib/":${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_PRELOAD=mylib.so