arangodump fails to authenticate with '@@' in the password about arangodb HOT 4 CLOSED

@wyattwalter : exactly. Unfortunately, a sequence of @ ... @ in command-line options (e.g. @foo@) is interpreted as a placeholder for environment variables, and will be replaced with the value of that environment variable (or the empty string if not set). This is an older feature for dynamic command-line option values about 8 years ago, which is even briefly mentioned in the docs.

Unfortunately the current behavior leads to ambiguity.

While using @@ could be treat specially and not be replaced, it would still be unclear what to do with values such as @abc@def. The @abc@ could means an environment variable abc or the literal string @abc@.
The workarounds for this are exactly as you already described in the ticket:

Workarounds that do work:

• leave the option off and let it prompt (this doesn't work in scripts)
• add an additional '@' for each one in the string. i.e. if the password is 'foo@@' then use 'foo@@@@'

If we'd change the behavior now to not replace sequences of @ ... @, I guess that would be the desired behavior for most people, because the replacement of @ ... @ often comes as a surprise and is totally unexpected. Changing it now however would change the behavior for everyone who has run into the issue already and has established the second workaround (i.e. replacing every @ with a @@) already. Unfortunately this makes the whole issue non-trivial to resolve, because we will somehow need to keep the current behavior available, at least as an option, and it is currently unclear how to select the desired behavior programmatically.

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Related PR to improve the startup option description: #20876

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You were not the first by far - hence the cause of action ;)

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Thank you both! That makes sense, I had missed that bit.

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