Safely change home directory

Question

I\'m trying to safely update the home directory as specified in /etc/passwd, but the standard Linux utils - usermod and vipw - for doing so aren\'t provided by

Answer 1

For the current user the following worked for me:

1. Close Cygwin.
2. Set the HOME Windows user environment variable.
3. Start Cygwin.
4. run "mkpasswd -c -p "$(cygpath -H)" > /etc/passwd".
5. Restart Cygwin.

I confirmed it worked by running ssh-keygen without any arguments. After making this change the app now defaults to saving the key to /cygdrive/c/Users/user instead of /home/user.

I don't know if setting HOME is required, but I did it anyway per instructions for setting up TortoiseGit with Cygwin using Tortoise's official documentation for unofficial Cygwin support here. Setting HOME alone though was not enough for ssh-keygen to recognize the home directory change.

Also, note that Cygwin's official documentation on this issue can be found here.

Confirmed in Windows 7 using 64-bit Cygwin v1.7.35.