How can I change my Cygwin home folder after installation

Question

I just installed Cygwin  and it looks like the home directory in the bash prompt is on my Z  drive  That s not where I want it   How can I change this

User · Answer

Change your HOME environment variable   on XP  its right-click My Computer    Properties    Advanced    Environment Variables    User Variables for      select variable HOME     edit

User · Answer

I happen to use cwRsync  Cygwin   Rsync for Windows  where cygwin comes bundled  and I couldn t find  etc passwd  And it kept saying Could not create directory   home username  ssh       Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts   home username  ssh known hosts    So I wrote a batch file which changed the HOME variable before running rsync  Something like  set HOME   rsync  path1 user host  path2  And voila  The  ssh folder appeared in the current working dir  and rsync stopped annoying with rsa fingerprints  It s a quick hotfix  but later you should change HOME to a more secure location

User · Answer

Starting with Cygwin 1 7 34  the recommended way to do this is to add a custom db home setting to  etc nsswitch conf  A common wish when doing this is to make your Cygwin home directory equal to your Windows user profile directory  This setting will do that   db home  windows   Or  equivalently   db home    H   You need to use the latter form if you want some variation on this scheme  such as to segregate your Cygwin home files into a subdirectory of your Windows user profile directory   db home    H cygwin   There are several other alternative schemes for the windows option plus several other   tokens you can use instead of  H or in addition to it  See the nsswitch conf syntax description in the Cygwin User Guide for details   If you installed Cygwin prior to 1 7 34 or have run its mkpasswd utility so that you have an  etc passwd file  you can change your Cygwin home directory by editing your user s entry in that file  Your home directory is the second-to-last element on your user s line in  etc passwd     Whichever way you do it  this causes the HOME environment variable to be set during shell startup     See this FAQ item for more on the topic     Footnotes    Consider moving  etc passwd and  etc group out of the way in order to use the new SAM AD-based mechanism instead  While it is possible to simply set  HOME  via the Control Panel  it is officially discouraged  Not only does it unceremoniously override the above mechanisms  it doesn t always work  such as when running shell scripts via cron

User · Answer

Cygwin 1 7 34   For those using Cygwin 1 7 34 or higher Cygwin supports configuring how to fetch home directory  login shell  and gecos information in  etc nsswitch conf  This is detailed in the Cygwin User Guide section    Cygwin user names  home dirs  login shells   If you ve previously created an  etc passwd or  etc group file you ll want to remove those and configure Cygwin using the new Windows Security model to POSIX mappings      -f  etc passwd     amp  amp  mv  etc passwd  etc passwd bak    -f  etc group     amp  amp  mv  etc group  etc group bak   The  etc nsswitch conf file s db home  setting defines how Cygwin fetches the user s home directory  The default setting for db home  is  db home   home  U   So by default  Cygwin just sets the home dir to  home  USERNAME  You can change that though to point at any other custom path you want  The supported wildcard characters are     u The Cygwin username  that s lowercase u    U The Windows username  that s uppercase U    D Windows domain in NetBIOS style   H Windows home directory in POSIX style  Note that  for the db home  setting  this only makes sense right after the preceeding slash  as in db home    H cygwin    Since space and TAB characters are used to separate the schemata  a space in the filename has to be given as     that s an underscore      A per-cent character    In place of a path  you can specify one of four named path schemata that are predefined     windows The user s home directory is set to the same directory which is used as Windows home directory  typically something along the lines of  USERPROFILE  or C  Users  USERNAME  Of course  the Windows directory is converted to POSIX-style by Cygwin  cygwin AD only  The user s home directory is set to the POSIX path given in the cygwinHome attribute from the cygwinUser auxiliary class  See also the section called    The cygwin schema     unix AD only  The user s home directory is set to the POSIX path given in the unixHomeDirectory attribute from the posixAccount auxiliary class  See also the section called    The unix schema     desc The user s home directory is set to the POSIX path given in the home       XML-alike setting in the user s description attribute in SAM or AD  See the section called    The desc schema    for a detailed description    The following will make the user s home directory in Cygwin the same as is used for the Windows home directory   db home  windows   Cygwin 1 7 33 or earlier  For those using Cygwin 1 7 33 or earlier  update to the latest version Cygwin and remove previously used  etc passwd and  etc group files  then see the steps above   Else  follow these older steps below   Firstly  set a Windows environment variable for HOME that points to your user profile    Open System on the Control Panel On the Advanced tab click Environment Variables  toward the bottom   In the User Variables area click  New     For Variable name enter HOME For Variable value enter  USERPROFILE  Click OK in all the open dialog boxes to apply this new setting   Now we are going to update the Cygwin  etc passwd file with the Windows  HOME  variable we just created  Shell logins and remote logins via ssh will rely on  etc passwd to tell them the location of the user s  HOME path   At the Cygwin bash command prompt type the following   cp  etc passwd  etc passwd bak mkpasswd -l -p   cygpath -H    gt   etc passwd  mkpasswd -d -p   cygpath -H    gt  gt   etc passwd    The -d switch tells mkpasswd to include DOMAIN users  while -l is to only output LOCAL machine users  This is important if you re using a PC at work where the user information is obtained from a Windows Domain Controller    Now  you can also do the same for groups  though this is not necessary unless you will be using a computer that is part of a Windows Domain  Cygwin reads group information from the Windows account databases  but you can add an  etc group file if your machine is often disconnected from its Domain Controller    At the Cygwin bash prompt type the following   cp  etc group  etc group bak mkgroup -l  gt   etc group  mkgroup -d  gt  gt   etc group    Now  exit Cygwin and start it up again  You should find that your HOME path points to the same location as your Windows User Profile -- i e   cygdrive c Users username

User · Answer

I d like to add a correction update to the bit about  HOME taking precedence  The home directory in  etc passwd takes precedence over everything   I m a long time Cygwin user and I just did a clean install of Windows 7 x64 and Cygwin V1 126  I was going nuts trying to figure out why every time I ran ssh I kept getting   e   gt ssh foo bar com Could not create directory   home dhaynes  ssh   The authenticity of host  foo bar com  10 66 19 19   can t be established        I add the HOME c  users dhaynes definition in the Windows environment but still it kept trying to create   home dhaynes   I tried every combo I could including setting HOME to  cygdrive c users dhaynes  Googled for the error message  could not find anything  couldn t find anything on the cygwin site  I use cygwin from cmd exe  not bash exe but the problem was present in both   I finally realized that the home directory in  etc passwd was taking precedence over the  HOME environment variable  I simple re-ran  mkpasswd -l   etc passwd  and that updated the home directory  now all is well with ssh    That may be obvious to linux types with sysadmin experience but for those of us who primarily use Windows it s a bit obscure

User · Answer

Cygwin mount now support bind method which lets you mount a directory  Hence you can simply add the following line to  etc fstab  then restart your shell   c  Users  home none bind 0 0

User · Answer

I did something quite simple  I did not want to change the windows 7 environment variable  So I directly edited the Cygwin bat file    echo off SETLOCAL set HOME C  path to home C  chdir C  apps cygwin bin bash --login -i ENDLOCAL   This just starts the local shell with this home directory  that is what I wanted  I am not going to remotely access this  so this worked for me

[cygwin] How can I change my Cygwin home folder after installation?

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