Hmmm... My /etc/profile.orig (I believe that's where I put the original /etc/profile before I modified it) hasYou're mixing stuff which doesn't belong to each other. Cygwin is not at all interested in $HOME or your /etc/passwd home entry. The evaluation of this values is done by tools in a UNIXy way. Shells (bash, tcsh, whatever) are traditionally only paying attention to $HOME. Remember how a logon to a UNIX machine works. First, there's a terminal on which runs a getty, then login(1) is called for the authentication, login's only available information is /etc/passwd. After authentication, login sets $HOME to the correct value and starts a shell. The shell relies on the fact, that $HOME has been set correctly by the logon procedure.
So, there are authenticating/logon tools which use /etc/passwd and there are user tools, which rely on $HOME already been set correctly by the former. That's just the way it works.
Especially /etc/profile should *not* take the /etc/passwd value for evaluating the home directory. /etc/profile is used by the shell, in a state when $HOME should already have a value. If /etc/profile sets $HOME, this would overwrite custom settings from login tools.
# Set up USER's home directory if [ -z "$HOME" ]; then HOME="/home/$USER" fi
Seems to me it not only can, but does set HOME if it has not been set before. If that be the case then why should it guess at using "/home/$USER" instead of the home field in /etc/passwd?
I guess I just think that the value of %HOME% should always equal the value of home in /etc/passwd thus giving the user one consistent home directory.
Granted you're correct that if %HOME% was set and is not the same as /etc/passwd's home then perhaps profile should not change the value. However to me this seems like a receipe for disaster or at least for mass confusion...
YMMV -- Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
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