argv gets mangled with cadence xcelium

I see that ARGV gets mangled when using excelium. cocotb crashes, complaining about invalid utf8 characters. The curious thing is: it only happens to the argument after the -f switch. I have modified VpiStartupCbHdl::run_callback() in VpiCbHdl.cpp to print info.argv and when i have

xrun -v93 -f xrun_files_cmd -timescale 1ns/1ps -licqueue ...

out comes: xrun -v93 -f ��� -timescale 1ns/1ps -licqueue ... If I move the -f option around, the filename stays mangled. If I have multiple -f options, i get multiple garbled filenames. All other options go through fine.

[eric-wieser]

Under my proposal, argv[n] == fname, argv[n].argv = ['flags', 'in', 'file'], recursively if needed

[marlonjames]

I think I found the answer to this.

From the 2001 standard:

The argument following a -f argument shall contain a pointer to a NULL terminated array of pointers to characters. This new array shall contain the parsed contents of the file. The value in entry zero shall contain the name of the file. The remaining entries shall contain pointers to NULL terminated character arrays containing the different options in the file. The last entry in this array shall be a NULL. If one of the options is a -f then the next pointer shall behave the same as described above.

From the 2005 standard (worded slightly differently):

The vendor tool may provide a command-line option to pass a file containing a set of options. In that case, the argument strings returned by vpi_get_vlog_info() shall contain the vendor option string name followed by a pointer to a NULL-terminated array of pointers to characters. This new array shall contain the parsed contents of the file. The value in entry zero shall contain the name of the file. The remaining entries shall contain pointers to NULL-terminated character arrays containing the different options in the file. The last entry in this array shall be NULL. If one of the options is the vendor file option, then the next pointer shall behave the same as described above.

So the number is a pointer to an array of pointers, each one of those a pointer to a string. Looks like 2001 indicates a -f option, but 2005 allows for other options.