cygstart doesn't handle question marks in mailto URLs

Ryan Johnson ryan.johnson@cs.utoronto.ca
Fri Mar 30 13:44:00 GMT 2012


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.

The same behavior is observed with `cygpath -wa ?' (and also cygpath -w, 
if the path passed in was non-trivial):
> $ cygpath -wa ?
> C:\cygwin\home\Ryan\
>
> $ cygpath -w ?
> ?
>
> $ cygpath -w ../?
> C:\cygwin\home\

FYI, the "unprintable" character is U+F03F, which is not even a valid 
unicode character.

> 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.

Ryan


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