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Subject:	Re: Something wrong with cygstart
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
References:	<5010206948 DOT 20251214121509 AT yandex DOT ru>
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Date:	Sun, 14 Dec 2025 13:48:30 +0100
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From:	Christian Franke via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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Andrey Repin via Cygwin wrote:
> I'm using a wrapper script to comfortably start VS Code from file manager.
>
> The last line of it is
>
> cygstart --hide -- "/proc/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft VS Code/bin/code.cmd" "$(cygpath -alw "$_arg")"
>
> It works well up to the point where there are no spaces in the $_arg. But on
> the first seen space it break the arguments list into pieces.
> I have to double-quote the argument to maintain the consistency, like
>
> cygstart --hide -- "/proc/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft VS Code/bin/code.cmd" "\"$(cygpath -alw "$_arg")\""
>
> but that's a questionable solution at best.

This is as expected. Unlike Cygwin's exec() emulation, cygstart does not 
add any quoting during conversion of the argv[] array to the plain 
argument string required for Windows process creation API.

Example:

$ cat test.cmd
@echo off
echo %%1 = '%1'>test.txt
echo %%2 = '%2'>>test.txt
echo %%3 = '%3'>>test.txt
echo %%4 = '%4'>>test.txt
echo %%5 = '%5'>>test.txt

$ ./test.cmd ArgOne 'Arg Two' 'Arg    Three'; cat test.txt
%1 = 'ArgOne'
%2 = '"Arg Two"'
%3 = '"Arg    Three"'
%4 = ''
%5 = ''

$ cygstart ./test.cmd ArgOne 'Arg Two' 'Arg    Three';\
   sleep 1; cat test.txt
%1 = 'ArgOne'
%2 = 'arg'
%3 = 'Two'
%4 = 'Arg'
%5 = 'Three'

$ cygstart ./test.cmd ArgOne '"Arg Two"' '"Arg    Three"' ;\
   sleep 1; cat test.txt
%1 = 'ArgOne'
%2 = '"Arg Two"'
%3 = '"Arg    Three"'
%4 = ''
%5 = ''

$ cygstart ./test.cmd 'ArgOne "Arg Two" "Arg    Three"' ;\
   sleep 1; cat test.txt
%1 = 'ArgOne'
%2 = '"Arg Two"'
%3 = '"Arg    Three"'
%4 = ''
%5 = ''

-- 
Regards,
Christian


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