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Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 13:24:14 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian@dessent.net>
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To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Error using cygstart command with option arguments: "cygstart: bad   argument"
References: <20050723194252.38651.qmail@web30211.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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Peter Farley wrote:

> I tried to use cygstart to execute bash with the "-c"
> option to execute a command and then terminate.
> Here's what I get:
> 
> $ cygstart bash -c echo Hi There
> cygstart: bad argument -c: unknown option

The problem that you are running into is that you need to tell cygstart
that the -c and following arguments are meant for the child process, and
are not arguments to cygstart itself.  '--' is a standard way of doing
this, which indicates to the program that all of the following arguments
should not be interpreted as switches but just regular data.  So
"cygstart -- bash -c ..." ought to work.

You will have to be careful with the quoting of the stuff after -c
though.  Cygstart is designed to use Windows-native methods to start a
process.  If you're using it to start a Cygwin process, and you want to
have an argument with spaces in it (as is the case with any nontrivial
-c) then you will have to be very careful with how you use quotes to
ensure that the Cygwin->Windows->Cygwin conversion of the argv[] works
correctly.  It would be much simpler to do something like: rxvt -e bash
-c "echo whatever".

Brian

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