My first thought was to fire up strace and figure out what magic incantation evince was calling. I cannot count how many times strace helped me.

My wild guess follows Lennard: evince is treating : as a protocol indicative, trying to handle it, and failing. If that's the case, you either rename the file, pass the full path, or implement the RE: protocol yourself... Remember to submit the RFC... 


On Fri, Jan 8, 2021, 11:07 Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 08:18:34PM -0500, Aruna Hewapathirane via talk wrote:
> Why not simply rename the file to something.pdf ?
>
> I just tested and the command(s) below works:
> mv 'RE: something.pdf' something.pdf && evince something.pdf && mv
> something.pdf 'RE: something.pdf'
>
> unless of course there is a real need to have it work using evince "RE:
> someting.pdf"?

: is special in filenames if it is before the first directory separator
for many programs since it might be host:filepath

evince for example allows ftp://host/file so it clearly cares about :
in the filename before any slash.

That's why using ./ in front works.  Otherwise you have to escape the :
with a \ or perhaps even two of them depending who strips it.

--
Len Sorensen
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