An equivalent to OS X’s “open” in Cygwin

cygwin;

I know this may be a slightly strange question, plus the fact that I'm asking it here. The reason is that whenever I ask Windows-people about this, or even regular Cygwin-users, they don't seem to understand why I need this functionality.

For those of you who haven't used "open" in the shell in Mac OS X, it works like this:

$ open somepic.jpg

$ open SomeFile.m

So it looks at the default program associated with the file, and opens it. I'd like to do the same from within Cygwin. Any ideas would be highly appreciated!

Best Answer

$ cygstart theFile.ext

This will open theFile.ext with the default app you have set for .ext files.

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After further research (here and here) I'm inclined to think the issue is NOT with Cygwin but rather with Windows 10. A light-bulb turned on in my head when I was in User2's Windows account yesterday and noticed I could launch Task Manager without a UAC prompt--something I knew User1 was always prompted for post Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 8 (despite that upgrade taking place almost a year ago during the free upgrade to Win 10 promotion). I figured it was a Windows 10 thing and never thought twice. When I realized it was happening prompt-free for User2 and googled work-arounds to fix it for User1, I found I could use the same work-around for User1's Cygwin issue. It still doesn't answer how User1's account got messed up in the first place, nor how to actually fix it the correct way, but I'm satisfied with this work-around as I can now get my git changes done for User1.

TL;DR

WORK-AROUND:

Open command-line (CMD.EXE) and set this variable to stop getting the UAC pop-up prompt:


set __compat_layer=runasinvoker

From the same terminal the environment variable was set, launch Cygwin:


c:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe

To make this permanent for this user (and make the desktop icon work again)


setx __compat_layer "runasinvoker"

To make this permanent for all users machine-wide, open admin command-line, then:


setx /m __compat_layer "runasinvoker"

And finally, to access git without fixing Cygwin, install "Git Bash".

Caveat: With the User1 account still technically broken, I still cannot use ssh to login but I can at least get to local Cygwin Terminal as User1. Also this work-around does not fix ability to modify User1's Windows User Environment variables via sysdm.cpl GUI (still get UAC prompt and then after only shows Admin's ENV vars instead of User1's) but that's something for the Windows-related Stack Exchange forum now that I know this is a Windows account problem and not Cygwin's. And SETX allows altering user and machine ENV vars from command-line.

Best Answer

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