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Re: USER environment variable mystery


Steve Núñez <nunez@helios.net> wrote:

> I've recently spent some time configuring cygwin, and it's mostly
> gone as expected. I say mostly because I've noticed a strange
> behavior with the USER environment variable, and possibly others.
> I've set this in both ~/.bashrc and in /etc/profile to be the user
> name that our UNIX machines expect (the surname). The windows 2000
> machine I'm using thinks that the USER is "firstname lastname". Now
> after setting these variables in ~/.bashrc, echo shows that they have
> been properly set, however both my bash prompt and applications such
> as ssh and xemacs continue to use "firstname lastname" (xemacs get's
> this from "(getenv USER)", making me suspect some strangeness in the
> getenv function).
>
> Does anyone know how to *really* change the environment variables? Is
> this set somewhere deeper in the cygwin structure?

Nope. Its a generic bash question, as far as I can tell.
Sounds like youv'e set the shell variable, but not exported it to the
environment.

> I've also tried
> setting this from the cygwin.bat file, but with no success.

Did you comment out the line in /etc/profile which resets it?

Anyway, you might be better served by modifiying your user entry in
/etc/passwd. Read Cygwin's user guide for the details, but I think you will
need to do something like (untested)

- Change your username to surname in the first passwd field
- Add a U-DOMAIN\firstname lastname to the gecos field.

But check in the cygwin user guide first!


Max.


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