On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Ken Brown <kbr...@cornell.edu> wrote: > On 9/13/2016 10:50 AM, Nem W Schlecht wrote: >> >> Hello all, >> >> So, I used to be able to do this in Cygwin to open a chat session (in >> my case, With Skype for Business aka S4B): >> >> cygstart "sip:u...@domain.com" >> >> But I noticed recently that this now fails with: >> >> Unable to start 'sipu...@domain.com': The specified file was not >> found. >> >> I have no idea why the colon ":" is getting converted into an a UTF >> F038 character. I'm also unsure of when this stopped working, since I >> don't use it all that often. >> >> [deletia] > > > There's no code in cygstart to recognize the SIP protocol. (It wouldn't be > hard to add such code, as was done a few years ago for "mailto:";. See line > 598 of cygstart.c in the sources for the cygutils package.) > > So cygstart treats "sip:u...@domain.com" as a file name. The funny Unicode > character you see comes from Cygwin's translation to allow ":" as part of a > file name. See > > > https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-specialchars
Thanks for the excellent breakdown, Ken. Makes sense with the colon ":". Still not sure why it did work a couple months ago and now doesn't. I was under the assumption that 'cygstart' was a very basic program that just passed whatever it was passed on to Windows to handle - similar to "Start-Process" in Powershell, or well, just like double-clicking on something on the Desktop. My 'cygstart's last mod time is Nov 24, 2015 and this was definitely working *after* that time, so something else changed. It's like 'cygstart' is assuming this is a file and trying to do something smart that way rather than just letting Windows handle it (as it would *need* to do if this were indeed a Cygwin path). Again, when I add in the extra slashes, S4B *does* get the SIP request. Without the slashes, something in Cygwin is assuming this is a filesystem call. I'll take a look at the 'cygstart' code and see if (with my lowly programming skills) I can suggest a patch. :) -- Nem W Schlecht "Perl did the magic. I just waved the wand." -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
