Make cygwin home directory to Windows' User Profile

Question

As I am developing Ruby on Rails on a Windows machine, I need to use cygwin to emulate the Unix command prompt. The problem now is that every time when I open the cygwin termina

Answer 1

mount -f "$USERPROFILE" ~
mount -m > /etc/fstab

Related

Safely change home directory

Answer 2

I was able to change mine by simply setting the HOME environment variable in Windows to C:\Users\MyUsername. When I start Cygwin, now it looks there. This has the added benefit of causing Emacs on regular Win32 (i.e., not via Cygwin) to start in the right place instead of in C:\Users\MyUsername\AppData\Roaming (and thus looking for .emacs and .emacs.d there)

Answer 3

According to Cygwin documentation you can edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and change de db_home parameter.

• %u - The Cygwin username (that's lowercase u).
• %U - The Windows username (that's uppercase U).
• %D - Windows domain in NetBIOS style.
• %H - Windows home directory in POSIX style. Note that, for the db_home: setting,
• %_ - Since space and TAB characters are used to separate the schemata, a space in the filename has to be given as %_ (that's an underscore).
• %% - A per-cent character.

Here is the content of my /etc/nsswitch.conf to create a home directory into each user directory

# /etc/nsswitch.conf
#
#    This file is read once by the first process in a Cygwin process tree.
#    To pick up changes, restart all Cygwin processes.  For a description
#    see https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-mapping-nsswitch    
# Defaults:
# passwd:   files db
# group:    files db
# db_enum:  cache builtin
# db_home: /home/%U <------ This was the default setting
db_home: /%H/home # db_home: /home/%U <- This was the default setting
# db_shell: /bin/bash
# db_gecos: <empty>

Restart any Cygwin process