* Dave Korn (Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:37:23 +0100) > On 10 August 2007 16:22, Thorsten Kampe wrote: > > > > The problem (/my/ problem and maybe Ronald's) is that d reads the home > > directory from /etc/passwd and not from the environment variable > > $HOME. In my setup these differ. > > Is that even valid? Hmmm. Posix does say: > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html > " HOME > The system shall initialize this variable at the time of login to be a > pathname of the user's home directory. See <pwd.h>. " > > but then again, it also says: > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html > " 3.192 Home Directory > The directory specified by the HOME environment variable. " > > and also: > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/sh.html > " HOME > Determine the pathname of the user's home directory. The contents of HOME > are used in tilde expansion as described in Tilde Expansion. This volume of > IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 specifies the effects of this variable only for systems > supporting the User Portability Utilities option. " > > although that last one was revised in Issue 6: > > " In the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES section, the text "user's home directory" is > updated to "directory referred to by the HOME environment variable". " > > > In my opinion $HOME should take precedence over the home directory set > > in /etc/passwd. > > I think it's kind of ambiguous. The 'd' man page specifically refers to > ".d.conf in the user's home directory", as opposed to "~/.d.conf"; I think > those two definitions are allowed to diverge, from what I quoted above. The > spec is unclear: how can you initialise HOME from "the user's home > directory", if whatever the user's home directory is is only defined in terms of the contents of $HOME, without reference to field #6 in /etc/passwd? That would be a circular reference to uninitialised data, that would!
Well, if it wasn't valid then there would be no sense to even set $HOME, right? Because it would have always point to the same path as the entry in /etc/passwd. Anyway, I'm not doing this for fun but because my home directory is on a removable drive and all applications I know honor $HOME (except irssi where I had to alias irssi='irssi --home=~ -- config=~/.irssi/config') Thorsten -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
