Login behaviour oddities: won't run .profile

[luke dot kendall at cisra dot canon dot com dot au]

I looked into a problem reported today, that ~/.profile is not executed
if you use Cygwin to create your home directory, instead of using
Windows Explorer to create the directory.

The user who reported it and I played around for a while, with getfacl
and setfacl to try to find the difference and fix them.  While setfacl
doesn't seem to allow you to do everything you need (specifically, you
can't use it to delete the default group ACL for ~ since you have to
specify a group, but there is no group for the default group), ACLs may
not be the full explanation anyway.

We managed to set the two directories to appear to have identical ACLs
according to the Advanced security tab in the Windows Explorer
properties - but that still didn't help!

Cygwin will only run ~/.profile if "~" was created via Win Explorer.
(This seems to be reasonably new behaviour - we've got a lot of users
who would have been affected every day, if this had been true for a
long time.)

My colleague said that he had to run an strace (presumably on bash), to
find out why .profile was being run.  It appears to stat ~/.profile,
look at the ACL, and then close .profile without reading and executing
commands from it (in the case where ~ was created by a Cygwin mkdir).

We explicitly mount, e.g., D:/home on /home in textmode, if that's any
help.

I've confirmed this problem on a fresh install.  I'm continuing to look
into it.  It doesn't appear to be a problem for older Cygwins.

CYGWIN_NT-5.1 DOYLE 1.5.10(0.116/4/2) 2004-05-25 22:07 i686 unknown unknown Cygwin

(That version above seems insensitive to who creates ~.  Whereas the one
below is sensitive.)

CYGWIN_NT-5.1 STOUT 1.5.10(0.116/4/2) 2004-05-25 22:07 i686 unknown unknown Cygwin

Hmm.  They look the same to me (perhaps because I update my Cygwin
quite regularly).

Anyway, as I said, I'm just starting to look into this.  Feel free to
suggest other tests I should try or things I should look into.

Regards,

luke


--
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/