Perhaps most people using Cygwin don’t realize this, but they actually have two home directories. One is their Windows home directory (%USERPROFILE%
) and the other is their Cygwin home directory (~
).
Several months ago I became frustrated with repeated navigation from one to the other, so I began using a symbolic link. In ~
I created a link to %USERPROFILE%
with ln -s "$USERPROFILE" home
. Thus, any time I wanted to change to my Windows home directory I would simply cd ~/home
.
It worked, but that dichotomy remained… Then, it occurred to me: why couldn’t ~
and %USERPROFILE%
be the same?
Luckily, they can! In fact, the Cygwin documentation on alternate home roots shows exactly how. Using mkpasswd
, one or all home directories may be set to any arbitrary path; to change all home directories to the Windows home directory:
Pretty neat. See the Cygwin documentation on alternate home roots for more information.