Mail Archives: cygwin/2004/06/02/19:45:01
* Chris Carlson (2004-06-02 21:47 +0100)
> I understand your frustration, but your experience is not everyone's.
Frustration?
> So far, I've installed cygwin on 7 different machines. One Windows 98,
> two Windows XP and at least 4 Windows 2000 systems. Of the seven, all
> were installed from the Internet, all were done at different points in
> Cygwin's development, all were clean installs (no previous version of
> Cygwin existed) and NONE of them have an /etc/profile file.
This is the reason of your missing path and $HOME.
> All have an /etc/profile.d directory. None have gone through the
> postinstall scripts without at least one of them hanging. Only
> after some time have I gotten man to work.
So your experience is absolutely contrary to mine. I still don't see
your point.
> It is clear the Mr. Fay doesn't understand bash well. He obviously
> doesn't know the purpose of /etc/skel.
/etc/skel isn't bash related.
> He may not understand man. If he's just doing a man command,
> there's a lot of information that gets scrolled by. It takes a
> dozen or more readings before you understand it all, presuming
> you've never used a Unix shell before.
The short "files" section at the bottom isn't hard to grasp. Every
utility that uses initialisation files has a files section at the
bottom of the man page.
> I had to set PATH and HOME in my Windows environment to get them to be
> set properly in Cygwin. I would think telling Mr. Fay that he needs to
> set them in the Windows environment would have been a much more useful
> reply.
*I* set $HOME "in Windows" (because I want other non-Cygwin
applications (BlackAdder, GVim etc) to look for rcfiles there. Mr. Fay
doesn't have any problems with his path or $HOME (at least he doesn't
mention any). So it's absolutely unneccessary to modify or set these
variables.
> Suggesting the reading of a book on shells wouldn't be quite
> useful either, since Cygwin does things just a little differently.
The differences are so minor that a non-expert would hardly notice
them.
> A pointer to the Cygwin document might have helped. I'm still looking for
> it.
Anyone able to type "cygwin.com" in to the address field of a browser
should be able to find the FAQ and the user guide.
Mr. Fay has just one problem: /etc/bashrc isn't read. Why he asks.
And my answer was: because it's not a bash file (as you can see at the
bottom of the manpage.
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