Subject: Re: HOME set to / [Was: cygwin-1.3.16-1]
From: "Arthur I Schwarz" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:45:02 -0800

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 10:46:42AM -0000, John Morrison wrote:
> > From: Chris Game
> >
> > In an earlier post, John Morrison  wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> > - now how do I get out of this 'None' group
> > that I'm apparently in, and into 'Users' or even 'Administrators'?
>

FYI: There has been a weather change (see Cygwin Reinstall Failure).
Apparently the 'newer' versions of cygwin no longer support the 'id'
function/builtin. As a result the /etc/profile script needs to be changed
to create the USER and HOME environment variable. I haven't done any
research to find out whether there is an automatic way to detect who I am
('who' not supported) so I hard-coded the answer.

To get a correctly running interactive login script do:

change /etc/profile to define USER and HOME correctly
change /etc/passwd  to define USER correctly (I did it with notepad)
change /etc/group   to define the USER group correctly, as needed

I usually run 'd2u' (dos to unix) on passwd and group to get them in the
Unix format. This is probably unnecessary.

The passwd/group entries will determine the group name. I usually become a
'super-something', 'hero', 'simple-user' or somesuch at my whim.

I don't know when the changes were made. I discovered the fix by looking at
the bash man pages and tracing through the invocation order and then
manually making the fixes. However, there seems to be other things broken
in my version (cygwin 1.3.17-1), passwd and more come to mind, and others
will show up in time. Sigh.

Corinna provided a description of a 'normal' passwd file. This is further
described in the cygwin user's guide.

A lot of reading.

And other users have mentioned this in their e-mails.

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