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

I edited my /etc/passwd file directly (making sure nothing else would be accessing it), and changed all references to /home to be /Users (on Windows 7). I found that, in order for everything to work correctly, I had to delete any directories in the /home directory (or move them to the appropriate other location). Otherwise, cygwin would develop a split personality where, for example, 'bash -l' would start in /home/Pablo but $HOME would be /Users/Pablo and emacs would appear to do the reverse. Once I deleted /home/Pablo, everything worked fine.