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 ended up exiting all my cygwin shells and editing it by hand in a text editor. So far, so good.

Note: don't escape the spaces in the "Documents and Settings" directory. The entry will look like

user:...:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/user:/bin/bash

The line is tokenized on the : character.

Answer 2

I like to keep my cygwin installation sync'd to a pen drive and another computer, so I hate hard-coding the home directory. I use the following cygwin.bat:

echo off
SETLOCAL
set SHELL=\\bin\\bash
set HOME=%~dp0..\..\doc\unix
bin\bash --login -i
ENDLOCAL

SETLOCAL and ENDLOCAL make sure that SHELL and HOME don't clobber existing env variables for other programs. HOME=%~dp0..\..\doc\unix sets HOME to be two directories up, in the doc/unix subdirectory. Then in ....\doc\unix.bashrc, I include PATH="/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin". I did not use start /wait %CD%\bin\bash to start bash, because I am using Console2, so I don't need an additional cmd window.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

I only needed to be in C:\Users\username when I start cygwin. So, I just added to .bashrc and .profile

cd ${HOMEPATH}

If you prefer to use ~/. instead of $HOMEPATH, you can also add the following:

export HOME=${HOMEPATH}

This way I don't disturb the cygwin installation.

Answer 6

The simplest answer I have found is to make /home to be a soft link to your Windows Home/UserProfile directory

cd /
mv home oldhome
ln -s "$(cygpath -H)" home

I used cygpath as it will get the proper location for the HOME directory on the current version of Windows. On my box cygpath -H returns /cygdrive/c/Users