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From: Thorsten Kampe <thorsten AT thorstenkampe DOT de>
Subject: Re: PATH and HOME in cygwin
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 01:44:48 +0200
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* 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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