MSYS2 on Windows 7 VM Post: 302947366

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Special Forums Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions MSYS2 on Windows 7 VM Post 302947366 by mrm5102 on Wednesday 17th of June 2015 12:54:00 PM

06-17-2015

Registered User

Bump....

Update:
Not sure I did this correctly or if it's going to mess anything up later on down the road, but I made a slight workaround... Haven't actually changed the existing Username, which I want to do but after reading some stuff for Cygwin, which is what MSYS is built off of I believe, it said the User in Cygwin is directly linked to that of your Window's User. So any files/folders will also be owned by your Windows User, or something along those lines...

But anyway, since MSYS does not create a /etc/passwd file, I ran the command

Code:

/usr/bin/mkpasswd  >  /etc/passwd

which created the passwd file using all existing user information. Then I simply modified the HOME dir portion of my User's line in /etc/passwd to a 'first intial last name' format, like "/home/flastname".

Then I copied everything from the old HOME dir to the new one using these 2 commands. Needed both because the first cp did not copy hidden files...

Code:

# cp -R /home/First*/* /home/flastname/
# cp -R /home/First*/.* /home/flastname/

After I did all that and I opened a new MSYS terminal, I was automatically taken to the NEW home dir by default.

I would still love to be able to change the Username itself if at all possible, but still have not found any instructions on how to do so.

I did however read an interesting article on someone trying to do this with Cygwin and what they did was:
1st) They installed Cygwin completely.
2nd) After the installation and before opening Cygwin for the first time they said they opened "/etc/passwd" and found the line containing their default Window's User and changed the username to something without whitespace, like the first initial and lastname format.
3rd) They opened the Cygwin terminal for the first time and Ta-Da, the new username was used instead...

Does that sound like something I should try? Could something like that mess-up anything else? Maybe file permissions, or something along those lines...? I would just hate to have to re-download any packages I've installed or re-do any modifications I made to the system already

Or... Maybe there is a way to "trick" MSYS into thinking it's the first time I'm opening MSYS and I could try the above, any idea..?

Thanks,
Matt

mrm5102

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passwd

PASSWD(5)						   File Formats and Conversions 						 PASSWD(5)

NAME

       passwd - the password file

DESCRIPTION

       /etc/passwd contains one line for each user account, with seven fields delimited by colons (":"). These fields are:

       o   login name

       o   optional encrypted password

       o   numerical user ID

       o   numerical group ID

       o   user name or comment field

       o   user home directory

       o   optional user command interpreter

       The encrypted password field may be blank, in which case no password is required to authenticate as the specified login name. However, some
       applications which read the /etc/passwd file may decide not to permit any access at all if the password field is blank. If the password
       field is a lower-case "x", then the encrypted password is actually stored in the shadow(5) file instead; there must be a corresponding line
       in the /etc/shadow file, or else the user account is invalid. If the password field is any other string, then it will be treated as an
       encrypted password, as specified by crypt(3).

       The comment field is used by various system utilities, such as finger(1).

       The home directory field provides the name of the initial working directory. The login program uses this information to set the value of
       the $HOME environmental variable.

       The command interpreter field provides the name of the user's command language interpreter, or the name of the initial program to execute.
       The login program uses this information to set the value of the $SHELL environmental variable. If this field is empty, it defaults to the
       value /bin/sh.

FILES

       /etc/passwd
	   User account information.

       /etc/shadow
	   optional encrypted password file

       /etc/passwd-
	   Backup file for /etc/passwd.

	   Note that this file is used by the tools of the shadow toolsuite, but not by all user and password management tools.

SEE ALSO

       crypt(3), getent(1), getpwnam(3), login(1), passwd(1), pwck(8), pwconv(8), pwunconv(8), shadow(5), su(1), sulogin(8).

File Formats and Conversions					    06/24/2011								 PASSWD(5)