How to access different directories outside cygwin home dir

cdcygwin;home-directorylocal-storage

I have installed dropbox in my computer, but it is located outside my cygwin directory. The probably easiest way would be to just move the dropbox directory to cygwin's home dir.
Anyway I wonder if it is possible to browse to my dropbox directory from cygwin instead?

Best Answer

You can access the root of your C: drive, for example, from cygwin by specifying the directory /cygdrive/c, e.g.,

$ cd /cygdrive/c

Similarly, the path to any file on your C: drive can be constructed by prefixing the Windows path (without the "C:" and with \s changed to /s) with /cygdrive/c, so C:\Dropbox\myfile would be accessed from within Cygwin as /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/myfile.

Related Solutions

How to change the home folder in cygwin

First of all make sure your domain user is added to /etc/passwd:

mkpasswd -d >> /etc/passwd

Then just edit /etc/passwd and let it point to your desired directory. For example my entry looks as follows:

myuser:unused:11555:10513:U-DOMAIN\myuser,S-1-5-21-3223550679-1857247031-121334384-2459:/cygdrive/c/Users/myuser/AppData/Roaming/cygwin/home:/bin/bash

This places the cygwin home directory within my roaming profile folder within my user profile.

Is it possible to have cygwin ignore the Windows HOME environment variable

Edit /etc/profile and change the lines

# Set the user id
USER="$(id -un)"

# Set the user id
USER="$(id -un)"

# Set user home dir
HOME=$(eval echo "~$USER")

This forces Cygwin always to use the value from /etc/passwd. This is better than using Cygwin.bat because this applies to all login shells, no matter how they're spawned.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to change the home folder in cygwin

Is it possible to have cygwin ignore the Windows HOME environment variable

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