Home directories and spaces

[Max Bowsher]

Tim Largy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I installed the cygwin distribution (February 14) on Windows XP and am
> having trouble with spaces my home directory "/cygwin/c/Documents and
> Settings/largy". For example, when I run the command "startx" at the
> bash prompt I get:
>
> [: and: unknown operand
> [: and: unknown operand
> export: Settings/largy/.Xauthority: bad variable name
>
> cat: /cygdrive/c/Documents: No such file or directory
> [: and: unknown operand
> [: and: unknown operand
>
> The X server does start, but I'd rather not see these error
> messages--obviously something is wrong. What are most people using as
> their home directories, and from the multitudinous ways of setting it,
> what is the preferred method?

The Cygwin default home dir is /home/username. Did you change it
deliberately, or did you have a HOME variable in your environment, from some
other program?

Try to avoid having spaces in directory names. In an ideal world, it
shouldn't matter, but it unfortunately there are too many scripts with poor
quoting out there.

> Part II
>
> Once the X server starts, the xterms in my session display this
> prompt:
>
> \[\033]0;\w\007
> \033[32m\]\u@\h \[\033[33m\w\033[0m\]
>
> Somehow the PS1 environment variable is screwed up. How should I set
> it?

No, thats /bin/sh (which on Cygwin is ash, the Almqvist shell). You probably
want "xterm -e bash".

Max.


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