Safely change home directory

EDIT: For recent versions of Cygwin (1.7.34 and beyond), see this newer question.

Like sblundy's answer, you can always edit by-hand.

But if you want to do it the "official" way, use the cygwin-specific mkpasswd command. Below is a snippet from the official docs on mkpasswd :

For example, this command:

Example 3.11. Using an alternate home root

$ mkpasswd -l -p "$(cygpath -H)" > /etc/passwd

would put local users' home directories in the Windows 'Profiles' directory.

There's a bunch of other really useful commands described on the Cygwin Utilities documentation page (which includes mkpasswd). The use of cygpath in the example above is another of these cygwin-specific tools.

While you're at it, you probably also want to read the Using Cygwin Effectively with Windows documentation. There's a bunch of really good advice.

I ended up exiting all my cygwin shells and editing it by hand in a text editor. So far, so good.

Note: don't escape the spaces in the "Documents and Settings" directory. The entry will look like

user:...:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/user:/bin/bash

The line is tokenized on the : character.

I always set HOME as a user-specific environment variable in Computer Properties.

To avoid problems caused by having spaces in the path to your home directory, use the short-form of the Windows 'Profiles' directory - i.e. /cygdrive/c/DOCUME~1/user.

You can do this by typing the command:

mkpasswd -l -p "$(cygpath $(cygpath -dH))" > /etc/passwd

I only needed to be in C:\Users\username when I start cygwin. So, I just added to .bashrc and .profile

cd ${HOMEPATH}

If you prefer to use ~/. instead of $HOMEPATH, you can also add the following:

export HOME=${HOMEPATH}

This way I don't disturb the cygwin installation.