Overriding the default HOME priority settings

Pat Cahalan psc@cs.caltech.edu
Tue Apr 5 21:23:00 GMT 2005


 From the Cygwin FAQ:

> When starting Cygwin from Windows, `HOME' is determined as follows in
> order of decreasing priority:
> 
> 1. `HOME' from the Windows environment, translated to POSIX form.
 > 2. The entry in /etc/passwd
 > 3. `HOMEDRIVE' and `HOMEPATH' from the Windows environment
 > 4. /

For reasons very complex, this behavior isn't workable in my
environment. I need Cygwin's home to ALWAYS use the entry in /etc/passwd
and bypass (1).

Is this possible?  I've read every scrap of documentation I can find and 
I don't see anything about overriding this default behavior.  Aside from 
examining source code and/or digging through the system registry (or 
asking this mailing list) I'm out of ideas...

(background information included for those interested parties)

The CS department cluster here at Caltech is built around the concept 
that *nothing* important lives on the local machine, and that everything 
that needs to be backed up is stored on the central file server.

The central file server, therefore, runs NFS and Samba.  The Linux 
clients automount the users' homedirectories.  The Windows clients have 
the same homedirectory mapped via the domain controller's built-in 
ability to define %HOME% for each user account.

However, all of the UNIX dotfiles in the user's homedirectory are 
configured with the assumption that the machine mounting the 
homedirectory also has other NFS automounts (and is set up as one of our 
standard Linux clients), which means that most of the dotfiles in %HOME% 
don't make sense to Cygwin.

--
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/



More information about the Cygwin mailing list