On Wed, May 8, 2019 at 9:50 AM Henning wrote: > > In order to not be misunderstood: the question is not about executing > a single command as a priviledged user. > > Instead, I'm asking how to get rid the annoying Unknown+User and > Unknown+Group with six digits IDs permanently.
This indicates user lookup is not working for some reason; did you configure and start the cygserver service? https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html > What I've tried so far: > > 1. put USER=root and HOME=/root > This gave me only /root as $HOME. > > 2. put the USER=root and UID=0 on the starting cmdline like so > U:\bin\mintty.exe -d -T tty1 -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico /bin/env TTY=1 > USER=root UID=0 /bin/bash -il > which gave me $UID=0 but not $USER=root > > 3. additionally set USER=root in ~/.profile > this finally yielded $USER=root I think you are conflating things... On Windows, UID 0 does not exist, and so trying to force UID 0 I would expect to result in less than guest privileges. > _but_ to no avail. because echo foo > bar and then ls -{l,n} showed > that absolutely nothing had changed: USER=Unknown+User (-1) etc. > And, what's worse, an attempt to chmod user perms of ./bar was not > possible. > > 4. following an old thread (Nov 2003) in the cygwin-apps mailing list > I created /etc/passwd with the line > root::0:0:me:/root:/bin/bash <snip> > > but again, to no avail. I simply can't get rid of the Unknowen+User > stuff. (And I am unable to change the user bits of permissions.) Except for relatively rare corner cases, the use of /etc/passwd in Cygwin has been deprecated for a long time now. This might actually be causing you significant problems now if you are not one of the rare corner cases. https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html > I forgot to mention that my Windows user name is root, and I am the > only user, that is, administrator, group administrators. And I have > switched off UAC (registry) in order to avoid constant annoyances > regarding permissions. I certainly understand the feeling here; what I do instead of disabling UAC is configure sshd and alias 'sudo' to 'ssh localhost'; this way I am not always running everything with the admin tokens. > What do I have to do, to get root (user and group). again, conflating; UID/GID 0 does not exist; the nearest equivalent is running the process(es) with the admin tokens in place. Trying to force UID/GID 0 may be what broke this in your environment. > N.B. My cygwin installation is up to date. Windows 8.1 > I have been using Linux for nearly 25 years (since kernel 1.2/3) and > cygwin since 2002. So this is not my first cygwin experience, but my > worst up to now. I reference https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html specifically because you specify your cygwin install is up to date, but you are using the deprecated /etc/passwd etc. files. -- Erik -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple