Is there a way to configure cygstart.exe?

Question

As I understand, cygstart associates its argument with the windows standard program set for that case.

But I want to behave my cygwin different than its host in certain cases.

E.g.

alias open='cygstart'
open some.pdf

should open the pdf with SumatraPDF instead of AcrobatReader, since it's more usefull to me when I'm working on cygwin. There is a --action option for open to specify a non default behavior, but that's too much typing.

So is there a way to configure open? Maybe by means of a config file or exporting a variable?

EDIT

The --action/-a doesn't seem to work.

$ open --action=sumatraPDF some.pdf 
Unable to start 'some.pdf': There is no application associated with the given file name extension.

Answer 1

It is simple enough to create your own open shell function that checks the file extension and does something special for .pdf and uses cygstart for everything else. For instance

function open
{
    case "$1" in
    *.pdf) sumatraPDF "$1";;
    *) cygstart "$1";;
    esac
}