On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 04:10:56PM -0700, Andrew DeFaria wrote: > Corinna Vinschen wrote: > >Cygwin doesn't pay attantion but tools do. sshd, login, ftpd and any > >other tool which requires the home directory for doing it's job, most > >server applications and also several client tools as, say, ssh. > > > I thought that that might be the case. Why then not make Cygwin pay > attention to the home field in /etc/passwd? Why not change /etc/profile > to use it? (Perhaps I'm treading over an issue that was already discussed).
You're mixing stuff which doesn't belong to each other. Cygwin is not at all interested in $HOME or your /etc/passwd home entry. The evaluation of this values is done by tools in a UNIXy way. Shells (bash, tcsh, whatever) are traditionally only paying attention to $HOME. Remember how a logon to a UNIX machine works. First, there's a terminal on which runs a getty, then login(1) is called for the authentication, login's only available information is /etc/passwd. After authentication, login sets $HOME to the correct value and starts a shell. The shell relies on the fact, that $HOME has been set correctly by the logon procedure. So, there are authenticating/logon tools which use /etc/passwd and there are user tools, which rely on $HOME already been set correctly by the former. That's just the way it works. Especially /etc/profile should *not* take the /etc/passwd value for evaluating the home directory. /etc/profile is used by the shell, in a state when $HOME should already have a value. If /etc/profile sets $HOME, this would overwrite custom settings from login tools. Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Developer mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Red Hat, Inc. -- 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/
