Re: 1.5.18-1: cygwin.bat/bash fails after installing Cygwin

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Jason Fritz (CO/EWU) wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I began typing this mail as a problem report, but thanks to a gracious
> reply from Chloe Chang, it turned out that I had not yet set my HOME
> environment variable to complete the installation.  I'll describe the
> problem anyway to help steer future Cygwin-er's clear of this issue.
>
> I had just installed Cygwin 1.5.18-1 plus default base packages for the
> first time on my Windows 2000 laptop.  After installation, running
> cygwin.bat (or the Cygwin shortcut on the desktop) gave the following
> error:
> C:\cygwin>cygwin.bat
> bash: can't find configuration file /usr/local/etc/profile.global; exiting.
>
> Searching the Cygwin mail archive, I found that Chloe had seen this
> problem back in June 2005.  See:
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-06/msg00759.html
>
> There was a reply from Igor Pechtchanski that said she was "not running
> the Cygwin version of bash".  I believe this analysis was wrong,
> however, since the bash package was installed by Cygwin's setup.exe,
> which presumably should only download a Cygwin version of bash.

Yes, but that doesn't guarantee that you would *run* that version.  Again,
the Cygwin version of bash will *not* look for
/usr/local/etc/profile.global -- that message comes from some other bash.
The analysis is correct, AFAICS.

One thing to try is to change the last line of your cygwin.bat to

c:\cygwin\bin\bash --login -i

and see if that solves your problem (with the original config)...

> After contacting Chloe directly,

Ugh.  She was way too polite.  Unsolicited private emails to random list
posters are highly discouraged -- the Cygwin mailing list is the place to
ask for help.

> she pointed me to the environment variable webpage for Cygwin:
> http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-env.html
>
> It turns out that I needed to set my HOME environment variable to
> something.  I set it to my My Documents directory:
> set HOME=C:\Documents and Settings\ewujafr\My Documents
>
> After that, cygwin.bat worked fine.  Note that a more permanent way to
> set HOME is via Control Panel->System then Advanced tab->Environment
> Variables.

I suspect you're still not running the official Cygwin bash -- it should
set HOME automatically.  As I said above, try forcing the Cygwin bash by
specifying the path to it explicitly.

> *** plea for change ***
> I think the main page for Cygwin, http://cygwin.com/, is misleading
> because it leads new users to believe that running setup.exe is all that
> you need to do.  There's no link to the setup instructions:
> http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-net.html.

This probably makes sense (though I believe setup itself should also have
a link to that page in the start pane).

> Can someone update the main page?  Better yet, setup.exe could set the
> HOME variable for the user, perhaps by adding an extra page to the setup
> wizard.

No.  Setup has no business mucking with the environment.  The HOME
variable should already be set automatically by the Cygwin version of
bash.
HTH,
	Igor
-- 
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If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
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