Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/10/23/14:40:28
Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>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 $HOME, this would overwrite custom settings from login tools.
>
Hmmm... My /etc/profile.orig (I believe that's where I put the original
/etc/profile before I modified it) has
# Set up USER's home directory
if [ -z "$HOME" ]; then
HOME="/home/$USER"
fi
Seems to me it not only can, but does set HOME if it has not been set
before. If that be the case then why should it guess at using
"/home/$USER" instead of the home field in /etc/passwd?
I guess I just think that the value of %HOME% should always equal the
value of home in /etc/passwd thus giving the user one consistent home
directory.
Granted you're correct that if %HOME% was set and is not the same as
/etc/passwd's home then perhaps profile should not change the value.
However to me this seems like a receipe for disaster or at least for
mass confusion...
YMMV
--
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
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