No etc/passwd (was) Re: (everything!) command not found

[DY]

in cygwin, if I go to /etc there is no passwd.  I'm definitely in cygwin. 
My prompt is bash-3.2$
Oh, and there's no profile in /etc either.  (or a .bash_profile, for 
that matter). 
Should that have been created automatically?

So it's pretty clear I did something fundamentally wrong in setup?  Any 
idea what?
I basically went to the cygwin page, picked "install now", downloaded 
setup.exe,
right-clicked on it and chose "run as administrator", then ran it, 
picked to install perl,
python, devel, the vim editor, and x11, and then let'er rip.   I tried 
it without running
as administrator, but that didn't work any better and left me with all 
the files being
read only. 

Thanks!!!
-Debra

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> No /etc/passwd file at all?  You're looking from bash, not from
> Windows, right? From Windows it'd be C:\Cygwin\etc\passwd...
>
> This sounds like something went wrong during the installation.  You
> can generate the default passwd file like so:
>
> mkpasswd -l >/etc/passwd
>
>
> But if your prompt is "c:\cygwin" then that sounds like you're not in
> bash at all, but still in the Windows shell (cmd.exe or command.com).
>
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 11:44 AM, DY wrote:
>   
>> Or maybe the problem is the profile.
>>     
>
> OK, totally different.  The password file identifies the users who
> exist on the system and the location of their home directory.  The
> profile is a set of bash commands to run automatically when you log
> in.  The only connection is that your home directory is used to find
> your personal profile files.
>
>   
>> After a bit of searching, I found the profile in /etc/defaults/etc,
>> but I don't know how to edit it properly to make the above happen.
>>     
>
> /etc/defaults/etc/profile is not used by anything; that's just a copy
> of the default file that goes into /etc/profile.  What actually gets
> run is /etc/profile.  But the way to set things up for your account is
> to make a .profile (or .bash_profile, if you'll always be using bash)
> in your home directory.
>
> To set the prompt you need to set the PS1 variable.
>
> But again, make sure you're actually running bash!
>
>
>   

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