Cygwin as non-adminstrator

[DePriest, Jason R.]

On 10/11/06, Tim Largy <> wrote:
> After installing and running Cygwin (on Windows XP Professional) as an
> administrator, I tried to run it as an ordinary user (no
> administrative rights) and ran into permission problems. When I
> installed Cygwin, I made sure to select the option to make Cygwin
> available to all users, however as an ordinary user, clicking on the
> Cygwin icon on my deskop started the BASH shell, which printed "bash:
> /etc/profile: Permission denied" and the shell was useless because the
> environment wasn't set up.
>
> Now, the Cygwin icon on the desktop is a .bat file with these contents:
>
> @echo off
>
> C:
> chdir C:\cygwin\bin
>
> bash --login -i
>
> When a user runs this script for the first time, the user's home
> directory is created in /home (really C:\cygwin\home) and
> configuration files are copied into the user's home directory. I'm not
> certain how this happens (anyone know?) but I'm guessing something
> about my file permissions is preventing this. I'm providing the output
> of cacls (the Windows command line utility for inspecting file
> permissions) for C:\cygwin, C:\cygwin\home, C:\cygwin\etc, and
> C:\cygwin\etc\profile. I'm not an expert in NT object permissions but
> perhaps someone who is will spot the problem, or tell me that I'm
> barking up the wrong tree. Here is the cacls output; note that
> SYSENG-PLAYPEN0\largyt is the administrative user who successfully
> installed and ran Cygwin; the ordinary user trying to run Cygwin
> doesn't appear anywhere in the output:
- - - - - 8< - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Since you are running Windows XP Professional, you can do a little bit
of troubleshooting via the GUI to set file permissions.

Open 'My Computer' / 'Explorer' and browse to the parent directory of
the directory you want to examine, for example C:\cygwin.

Right click on the directory you want to examine and select Properties.

For example, I right clicked on C:\cygwin\etc

Visit the Security tab and click on the Advanced button.

Select the tab on the far right: Effective Permissions

Put a user name in the 'Group or user name' field that cannot access
the folder and then try one that can access this folder.

Hopefully, your problem will jump out.

Another thing to examine is your /etc/passwd file.

Make sure the users who will be using the system is listed there and
if not put him in with the mkpasswd command.

-Jason

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