Re: ssh problem with $HOME

[Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au>]

On Friday, September 5, 2003, 2:42:57 AM, Igor wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

>> Hi,
>>
>> When attempting a "cvs update" using over the ssh protocol (well, you
>> know what I mean ;), I get the following error:
>>
>>   $ cvs up
>>   Could not create directory '/home/Gavin Sinclair/.ssh'.
>>
>>
>> That is surprising, because:
>>
>>   $ echo $HOME
>>   /home/gavin
>>
>>
>> I have read the manpage, /usr/doc/*, googled, and searched the
>> archives, but found nothing.  The manpage (ssh), in particular, says
>> that $HOME/.ssh is where the heart is, so I suspect a Cygwin nuance.
>> Of course cvs is involved here, but I doubt it's having any influence.
>>
>> Does anybody know what might be going on?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Gavin

> It's likely that the ssh daemon uses a different place to compute your
> $HOME (usually /etc/passwd).  The default /etc/profile will use the
> Windows environment variable instead, if it's set.  Please make sure your
> /etc/profile contains the correct path to your home directory, and that
> you don't set your $HOME somewhere where not all apps have access to it
> (e.g., your Windows environment).

That has fixed the problem; thanks.  Maybe I had manually set it
before, which was trashed when I reinstalled Cygwin recently.  It's a
pain to have these out of sync, but that's life in a Windows world.

I wasn't sure what you meant by the last sentence above.  I do set
$HOME in windows, so all apps can benefit from it, and /etc/profile
honours that.  Why ssh feels the need to look at /etc/passwd, when it
is documented to look at $HOME, I don't know.

Thanks again,
Gavin


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