Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/10/23/04:06:50
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 04:10:56PM -0700, Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >Cygwin doesn't pay attantion but tools do. sshd, login, ftpd and any
> >other tool which requires the home directory for doing it's job, most
> >server applications and also several client tools as, say, ssh.
> >
> I thought that that might be the case. Why then not make Cygwin pay
> attention to the home field in /etc/passwd? Why not change /etc/profile
> to use it? (Perhaps I'm treading over an issue that was already discussed).
You're mixing stuff which doesn't belong to each other. Cygwin is not
at all interested in $HOME or your /etc/passwd home entry. The evaluation
of this values is done by tools in a UNIXy way. Shells (bash, tcsh,
whatever) are traditionally only paying attention to $HOME. Remember how
a logon to a UNIX machine works. First, there's a terminal on which runs
a getty, then login(1) is called for the authentication, login's only
available information is /etc/passwd. After authentication, login sets
$HOME to the correct value and starts a shell. The shell relies on the
fact, that $HOME has been set correctly by the logon procedure.
So, there are authenticating/logon tools which use /etc/passwd and
there are user tools, which rely on $HOME already been set correctly
by the former. That's just the way it works.
Especially /etc/profile should *not* take the /etc/passwd value for
evaluating the home directory. /etc/profile is used by the shell, in
a state when $HOME should already have a value. If /etc/profile sets
$HOME, this would overwrite custom settings from login tools.
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat, Inc.
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