Message-ID: <4F760497.2050504@cs.utoronto.ca>
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:08:07 -0400
From: Ryan Johnson <ryan.johnson@cs.utoronto.ca>
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To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: cygstart doesn't handle question marks in mailto URLs
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On 30/03/2012 1:52 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
> 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.
Interesting... I expected it was doing strchr(aPath, ':') to detect URLS.

Given that ':' "special" for both Windows paths and URLS, why not just 
call strchr(aPath, ':') ? Then we'd catch ftp, **http, mailto, etc. all 
in one fell swoop. Whether to make "file:" (or "file://") a special case 
is technically orthogonal (but probably a good idea).

**BTW, it turns out that Windows and Firefox both do the right thing 
with `http:www.cygwin.com'

Ryan


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