If Cygwin ssh, git, etc. can't find your .ssh directory

[Brian Inglis]

On 2020-04-24 09:37, Thomas Wolff wrote:
> Am 24.04.2020 um 15:46 schrieb Mark Hansen:
>> I had a case when I took my office laptop home and found that in the Cygwin
>> environment,
>> commands were not able to find my .ssh directory. It seemed those commands
>> didn't know
>> where my home directory was, and was defaulting to "/".
>>
>> After asking on the Cygwin newsgroups, I received the following comment:
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> I also have had to deal with this problem. You should certainly read
>> https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html.
>>
>> After much experimenting and consultation with Corinna, we decided the
>> best solution for me was:
>>
>>   * Create /etc/passwd and /etc/group files
>>       o For /etc/passwd, I included just my account, and I actually
>>         editted it further to use my preferred username (rather than my
>>         domain username) and my correct home directory
>>   * Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf with:
>>       o passwd: files
>>       o group: files
>>
>> This is not the generally recommended configuration, but in the
>> situation where you cannot reach the domain server, it may be the best
>> alternative. You may or may not need to back these changes out when you
>> are back at work. I have not had a problem at work, but we are only
>> loosely connected to the domain, so YMMV.
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> After making the changes, I rebooted the machine and now it seems to work.
>>
>> Note that when using the PC from home, I also had to set the HOME environment
>> variable in the environment variable settings.
>> Sorry, this was a mistaken post. If an admin can do so, please delete it. Thanks.

> Not sure why you consider this mistaken. I'm not sure whether it's related but
> occasionally I also have a problem with ssh not finding .ssh. It's caused by ssh
> looking for ~/.ssh while my config dir is in $HOME/.ssh. These are generally
> assumed to be the same, but sometimes I observe the idea of bash what ~ means to
> get broken, without noticeable pattern so fare. It then points to /home/$USER
> while I've configured may HOME on one machine to be somewhere else. Weird...

Entries under /home/ are not modified by Cygwin setup, so it is safe to:

	$ ln -s /proc/cygdrive/c/Users/$USER /home/

which ensures that your Cygwin and Windows home dirs match.

If you tried to e.g.

	$ ln -sT /proc/cygdrive/c/Users /home

Cygwin setup would just remove that link and recreate the directory next run.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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