Files with a ':' in the file name open properly from File -> Open, but it will not open the same file when parsing it from the command line. soffice myfile:xxxx soffice myfile\:xxxx soffice 'myfile:xxxx' All of these commands will begin to load calc, show the splash screen, and then silently fail.
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Yep, I get this for all of the three variants mentioned in comment 1: ./soffice kaksois\:piste.ods warn:unotools.misc:3251:1:unotools/source/misc/mediadescriptor.cxx:626: caught ContentCreationException "No Content Provider available for URL: kaksois:piste.ods" while opening <kaksois:piste.ods> warn:filter.config:3251:1:filter/source/config/cache/typedetection.cxx:455: caught Exception "Could not open stream for <kaksois:piste.ods>" while querying type of <kaksois:piste.ods> warn:fwk.dispatch:3251:1:framework/source/dispatch/loaddispatcher.cxx:132: caught LoadEnvException 0 "type detection failed" while dispatching <kaksois:piste.ods> warn:tools.debug:3251:1:tools/source/debug/debug.cxx:297: no DbgTestSolarMutex function set Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit Version: 4.5.0.0.alpha0+ Build ID: 0ffa3abc7d6c0437ece30cfb1430d28ffcc9f5c1 TinderBox: Linux-rpm_deb-x86_64@46-TDF-dbg, Branch:master, Time: 2015-01-15_22:47:16
soffice accepts arguments that are either URLs or pathnames in system-specific notation. Those two sorts of syntax have overlap, so there are inputs that are ambiguous whether they shall denote a URL or a pathname, and LO uses some heuristics there but will necessarily mis-guess in some cases. What you need to do to disambiguate a filename containing a colon as a pathname is to make it into a relative pathname containing a slash before the colon, as in soffice ./myfile:xxxx (The quoting examples you gave above, myfile:\xxxx and 'myfile:xxxx' are completely irrelevant here, assuming you are demonstrating what you typed into a Posix shell, as these quotings are undone by the shell and are not seen by soffice.)
(What /is/ a bug, though, is that LO silently fails for command line URLs that it doesn't know how to handle, like <myfile:xxxx>, without giving any error message to the user. But I'm almost certain there is already a bug report for that.)