Thanks for the quick reply Daniel. I've looked at the qemu man page many times but somehow never noticed that it can take one non-option argument alongside any other options. That does explain what is going on here. In that case I'm not going to push for a potentially breaking change.
Perhaps it would still be beneficial to emit a warning about the empty string, at least when it has occurred in conjunction with a non- removable drive (I suppose one is created automatically if no other options are present?) which doesn't make sense to get such a path. I feel like the scenario in which it is intended might be less common than the scenario in which it has happened accidentally. Maybe I'm biased though ;) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1911188 Title: qemu-system-x86_64 prints obscure error message and exits when encountering an empty argument Status in QEMU: New Bug description: QEMU emulator version 4.2.1 (qemu-4.2.1-1.fc32) on Fedora 32. When writing a script to start qemu automatically, I ran into a very confusing error message due to a bug in my script and had trouble understanding it. I isolated the problem to the following: $ qemu-system-x86_64 "" qemu-system-x86_64: Initialization of device ide-hd failed: Device needs media, but drive is empty As you can see, running qemu with an empty argument prints a seemingly random and unrelated error message about an ide-hd device, and the program immediately exits with code 1. This happens when an empty argument appears anywhere in the arguments list, always causing the program to immediately die with this error. This is a simply baffling message to be encountering when the problem is really an empty argument. Expected behaviour: Either flatly ignore the empty argument, or at most trigger a warning (eg, "warning: saw empty argument"). It should not at all prevent the program from running. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1911188/+subscriptions
