Well I actually think I'm almost there with a portable CD version that can be plugged in to any Windows machine without regard to privileges (as long as the machine is switched on: one might need privileges to achieve that). Made yet another CD tonight for testing around the workplace tomorrow.
It necessarily involves starting off "unknown". In the course of trying to work my way round this I became finally aware of something that's been nagging me in the background for ages: specifically (and nastily) that the default name for an otherwise unspecified group is "mkpasswd", as in ~> id uid=400(unknown) gid=401(mkpasswd) groups=401(mkpasswd) or ~> ls -al drwxr-xr-x 7 unknown mkpasswd 2048 Jul 3 18:51 ./ drwxr-xr-x 3 unknown mkpasswd 2048 Jul 3 18:51 ../ -r--r--r-- 1 unknown mkpasswd 509 Jul 3 21:00 .bashrc drwxr-xr-x 2 unknown mkpasswd 2048 Jul 3 18:51 bin/ It seems a strangely arbitrary and inappropriate choice to me. If this is a Unix inheritance then I suppose it's best not to fiddle, but is it something that could be altered? (Is it, in fact, a minor error?) Fergus -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/