cygwinetcpasswd

Safely change home directory


I'm trying to safely update the home directory as specified in /etc/passwd, but the standard Linux utils - usermod and vipw - for doing so aren't provided by Cygwin.

Could anyone tell me how they changed this in Cygwin?


Solution

  • I ended up exiting all my cygwin shells and editing it by hand in a text editor. So far, so good.

    Note: don't escape the spaces in the "Documents and Settings" directory. The entry will look like

    user:...:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/user:/bin/bash
    

    The line is tokenized on the : character.