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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