Sorry, a very individual query:
I have two portable Cygwins, one on a stick, one on a mobile drive. They are both up-to-date though only the one on the drive is a Full installation. In all other respects they are not obviously different (mounting -buf at the start, un-mounting at the end, etc) and each is started in a bash shell. They have identical /etc/group and /etc/passwd. After starting the one on the drive, a selection from the output of set gives
        BASH=/usr/bin/bash
        HOME=/home/user
        SHELL=/bin/bash
while the one on the stick has
        BASH=/bin/bash
        HOME=/home/user
        SHELL=/bin/bash
I do not understand how this difference (in the definition of BASH) arises though I can see it shouldn't matter. It's the only difference in the entire output from set on the two devices. On the drive I can type rxvt <Enter> and immediately get into a rxvt shell with $HOME/.bashrc read. This is odd (I would have expected to have to type rxvt -e bash <Enter>) but convenient because of the reduced typing. On the stick I actually do have to type rxvt -e bash <Enter>; the reduced form rxvt <Enter> does not read $HOME/.bashrc and I end up in a rxvt terminal with
        BASH=/usr/bin/sh
This, conversely, is expected (but, in comparison, inconvenient).
Regardless of expectedness/ unexpectedness/ convenience, I would really like to understand the reason for the difference in behaviours. But I really do not want to bother you with loads of individualised corollary information (and last time I did I somehow sent it en clair to people's mailboxes and got admonished by somebody or other in the good ol' imperial manner) ... it would be good if an expert could explain the strange difference in the initial setting of BASH; or tell me where or how BASH is set so that I could try to explore the difference myself; and offer some kind of expert conjecture on whether the difference in the setting of BASH could be relevant to the different consequences of typing rxvt <no arguments> <Enter> at the bash prompt on the two devices.
Thank you.
Fergus


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