Message-ID: <4F75F2D7.8090705@cornell.edu>
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:52:23 -0400
From: Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>
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To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: cygstart doesn't handle question marks in mailto URLs
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On 3/30/2012 12:04 PM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
> On 30/03/2012 11:14 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On Mar 30 09:43, Ryan Johnson wrote:
>>> On 30/03/2012 9:27 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
>>>> If I type `cygstart mailto:recipient?subject=subject' at a Cygwin
>>>> bash prompt, I expect my default Windows mail program to start an
>>>> outgoing message with `recipient' as recipient and `subject' as
>>>> subject. (This is what happens if I type the same URL into a
>>>> `Start Menu -> Run' box.) What happens instead is that
>>>> `recipient?subject=subject' shows up as the recipient, with the
>>>> question mark replaced by something unprintable, and the subject
>>>> is blank.
>>>>
>>>> Is this a bug in cygstart, or am I misunderstanding something?
>>> I suspect a bug in the way cygwin1.dll handles conversion from unix-
>>> to windows-style paths.
>> http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#IAFNAB
>>
>> http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-specialchars
>>
> Makes sense... for files, but we're dealing with a URL here, so it *is*
> a bug IMO (but you're right, not a bug in cygwin's handling of
> windows-style paths).
>
> Cygstart knows it's dealing with a URL.

Actually, it doesn't, and that's the problem.  Here's the relevant code 
in cygstart.c:

/* Start a program, or open a file or URL, using Cygwin POSIX paths */
static int
cygStart (const char *aPath, const wchar_t * action,
           const wchar_t * args, const char *workDir,
           int show, StartFlags startFlags)
[...]
   /* Convert file path from POSIX to Windows, unless it looks like a URL */
   if (!strstr (aPath, "://"))

Chuck, what would you think of changing this so that cygstart would 
recognize `mailto:' URLs?  It would also be useful if cygstart could 
learn to handle `file://' URLs involving POSIX paths.

Ken

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