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Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:05:50 +1000
From: Wes Barris <wesb AT wesbarris DOT com>
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To: Cygwin Mailing List <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: How to properly set up /etc/passwd and /etc/group
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I have installed cygwin on many systems.  One thing that has always
bugged me is that I have to muck around with the uid and gid in the
/etc/passwd and /etc/group files in order to get things working.
The mkpasswd and mkgroup commands don't seem to produce files that
work.  I'm sure that I'm missing some fundamental knowledge about
this but I don't know what.  I've read the mkpasswd man page, the
FAQ and searched for posts but have found nothing that helps me.

Here is a simple case.  My home computer runs XP.  I want my /cygwin
home directory to be the W drive (/cygdrive/w).  After installing
cygwin and changing the home path in the /etc/passwd file to /cygdrive/w,
a long listing of my home directory shows a bunch of '?' question marks
as the owner and group fields like this:

drwxrwxrwt+ 1 ???????? ????????   0 2010-01-10 17:13 Projects

What I normally end up doing is to list the directory with the '-n'
option that shows me the uid and gid information (in this case
both are 4294967295.  I manually edit the /etc/passwd and /etc/group
files accordingly so that my directory listing looks like this:

drwxrwxrwt+ 1 wes     admin   0 2010-01-10 17:13 Projects

What is the correct procedure for getting this set up correctly?
-- 
Wes Barris

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