This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Purging Old and Invalid User Names With Spaces


On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Keith Mitchell wrote:

> In am running Windows XP SP2. I was having trouble with applications
> running under CygWin because I originally had spaces in my user names. I
> changed all the user names on my system, eliminating all the spaces in
> the user names. I then rebooted the computer just in case. Nothing
> changed. I then deleted my whole CygWin installation and reinstalled
> everything fresh from the web from scratch. Things were still broken in
> the same way!! I checked /etc/passwd file. All the user names were
> wrong. The user names were the same old user names I had in place before
> I changed the names eliminating the spaces. I do not know where CygWin
> found a list of those old and obsolete user names containing spaces, but
> it did find them somewhere. (probably in the registry). And it used
> them.
>
> My question. How can I purge those old and now invalid user names so
> CygWin uses only the current, correct, and valid user names, user names
> without spaces?

Your /etc/passwd was generated when you installed Cygwin, and wasn't
regenerated since, so did not pick up the changes in your usernames.  If
you have not edited it, you can simply regenerate it using "mkpasswd" (see
"man mkpasswd" or the appropriate section of the Cygwin User's Guide for
details).  Alternatively, as Larry said, you can just edit that file and
fix up the usernames, which are in the first column.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu | igor@watson.ibm.com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose"...  -- Janis Joplin

--
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/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]