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Subject: RE: Bizarre Cygwin/Explorer/paths problem half-solved
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 09:31:30 -0400
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From: "Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]" <BBuchbinder AT niaid DOT nih DOT gov>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>, "Luke Kendall" <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
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Luke Kendall wrote on Monday, August 04, 2008 4:18 AM:

> I discovered today that if I try to run Windows Explorer from the
> Cygwin command line, and give it a pathname with spaces, it fails,
> but if I give the same command line to a cmd.exe command line,
> Explorer works!   
> 
> I.e. from Bash, explorer fails with an error message like "The path
> '/e,c:\temp\space dir' does not exist or is not a directory." 
> 
> I've tried every quote combo I can.  If I leave off the /e option
> then it does open the directory, but without the side pane (which is
> what you'd expect with the /e option omitted).  
> 
> Bash shell:
> 
>     $ mkdir c:/temp/"space dir"
> 
>     $ explorer /e,c:\\temp\\space\ dir
>     $ # NBG^
>     $ explorer /e,c:\\temp
>     $ # GOOD^
>     $ explorer c:\\temp\\space\ dir
>     $ # GOOD^ (but no side pane)
>     $ explorer /e,"c:\temp\space dir"
>     $ # NBG^
>     $ explorer /e,"\"c:\temp\space dir\""
>     $ # NBG^
> 
> DOS shell:
> 
>     c>explorer /e,c:\temp\space dir
>     c>rem  GOOD^
>     c>explorer /e,"c:\temp\space dir"
>     c>rem  GOOD^
>     c>explorer /e,'c:\temp\space dir'
>     c>rem  NBG^
>     c>explorer /e,c:\temp\space dir
>     c>rem  NBG^
> 
> Until I tried the same stuff under the DOS shell, I assumed it was
> explorer.exe that was busted.  Now I'm just confused. 
> 
> I find this quite bizarre.  Any suggestions?  Is bash or Cygwin
> guessing the /e option is part of a path, and doing some extra
> quoting of its own or something?  
> 
> I just tried an strace on bash, and it looks like this guess is
> correct: 
> 
>   140 4166625 [main] bash 5696 spawn_guts: null_app_name 0
>    (c:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe, c:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
> "/e,c:\temp\space dir") 
> 
> It's collected all the arguments and put them inside double quotes,
> and if I do that in a DOS shell too I get the exact same failure. 
> 
> If the directory contains no spaces, then bash does this, in contrast:
> 
> 12217 33394057 [main] bash 5284 spawn_guts: 5284 = spawn_guts 
> (/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/explorer, c:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe /e,c:\temp) 
> 
> Is there some way to tell Bash/Cygwin not to do this?  Or is it
> simply that my bash is too old? 
> 
> $ bash --version
> GNU bash, version 3.2.9(10)-release (i686-pc-cygwin) Copyright (C)
> 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 

As a work-around, you might try the -x or --explore option of cygstart.
I use it in the following script (which I cal "explore"), though a
shell function might be better if you use this a lot.

====[ cut ]====
#!/bin/bash
/bin/cygstart --explore "${1:-.}"
====[ cut ]====

"${1:-.}" makes explorer open in the current working directory run
without an argument.

If this does not do what you want, you could always try launching
explorer with cygstart (without -x, giving you control of explorer's
command line arguments) or cmd /c start.  And one way to get rid of
spaces is to go to that directory.  You could just

$ pushd /cygpath/c/temp/space\ dir
$ explorer /e,.
$ popd

Good luck!

- Barry
  -  Disclaimer: Statements made herein are not made on behalf of NIAID.

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