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Re: setup/mkpasswd and HOMEDRIVE/HOMEPATH


Dave Korn wrote:
Larry Hall (Cygwin Developers) wrote:
On 05/06/2009, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Don't we still need '/' as the ultamite default in '/etc/profile'
in case all others couldn't be accessed for some reason?
Explain "couldn't be accessed".  The default case of /home/$USER
doesn't exist when a user starts bash for the first time.  So it
isn't "accessible", but /etc/profile will create the directory.
Sorry, I was too slow today, though as you say, we can always make
changes if needed so I'll answer anyway. ;-)

I was basically thinking of the pathelogical case where the user
doesn't have permissions to create or access the home directory
due to some strange phenomena (somebody messed up permissions,
'/home/<user>' points to a shared drive that's inaccessible, etc.).

I was thinking of that too, but I'd hardly call it 'pathological'. It's standard practice on Linux for /home to be owned by root and only have r-x perms for everyone else, as root is the only one who should be adding new users and hence the only person who should be creating dirs in /home.

  In cygwin we're effectively letting non-admin users control most of the
'adduser' behaviour themselves.  Someone might easily think that chmod'ing
/home 755 was a good idea.

Right.


And as to the terminology, let's call them "corner cases" instead so no one
gets hung up on semantics. :-)

--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 429-6305 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746


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