Does cygstart always expand arguments?

Thu May 15 01:52:00 GMT 2003

Jim Kleckner wrote:
>> Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>>> On 2003年5月13日, Jim Kleckner wrote:
>> ...
>>> FYI, the following works for me:
>>>> cygstart gvim '"file with spaces.txt"' '"another file with spaces.txt"'
>>> Yep, you did it, thanks! A gold star for you, though
> definitely not as valuable as cgf's.
>> Another case of peeling off layers of
> "quoting the quotes". There must be some
> DOS shell buried in there as part of the
> invocation or something. 

No DOS shell involved here. (cygstart directly calls the Win32 API 
ShellExecute function.) It's actually the (UNIX) shell which peels of 
the quotes.
I'll make some changes to cygstart so that arguments with whitespace 
will be (re-)quoted. I should be able to do this at the latest this 
weekend.
(Note that this won't be 100% backwards compatible - for instance, this 
breaks the above workaround. But I think we can live with that, it's 
better than the current behaviour.)
>>> If anyone cares, here is a small bash
> snippet that will create either a shell
> alias or a function to figure out which
> version of gvim/vim/vimx/vi is available
> to use.
>Here's mine:
 vi()
 {
 local args=""
 local arg dir
 # Loop through arguments to command
 for arg; do
 # Is it an existing file? Translate to Windows format
 if [[ -f "$arg" ]]; then
 # Use short name iff filename contains space
 if [[ "$arg" != ${arg/ /} ]]; then
 arg=`cygpath -w -s "$arg"`
 else
 arg=`cygpath -w "$arg"`
 fi
 # Or is it a non-existing file in an existing directory (not 
.)? Also
 # translate to Windows format
 else
 dir=`dirname $arg`
 if [[ "$dir" != "" && "$dir" != "." && -d "$dir" ]]; then
 arg=`cygpath -w $arg`
 fi
 fi
 args="$args $arg"
 done
 # Run gvim
 gvim $args <&0 &
 disown
 }
Note that I don't use cygstart, but run 'disown' to solve the 'problem' 
of job ownership.
(Actually, this is my Bash version of this function. in my Zsh version, 
which I use normally, I run "gvim $args <&0 &!" instead.)
 - Michael
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