How to change the username of your Cygwin user

How to change the username of your Cygwin user

How to change the username of your Cygwin user

3 Comments on How to change the username of your Cygwin user written by Hylke

I love Cygwin, I hate the commandline (cmd.exe) of Windows, so I always have one or more Cygwin terminals open (no need to use putty, yay!) But I ran into a snatch today: i tried to change my username for my cygwin installation. Last time around it was easy: opening an editor and changing the first field in the /etc/passwd file.

This time around it wasn’t as easy as that, I had not /etc/passwd file!

It seems Cygwin changed somewhere in the last couple of years. But no problem, just run mkpasswd > /etc/passwd before the nano /etc/passwd so you have a file to edit.

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3 Comments

  1. Ron E.  - August 25, 2015 - 00:39
    Reply /

    Thanks! Looked all over only being told to edit the /etc/passwd file but never how to populate it first.

  2. Merlin J  - September 4, 2015 - 21:17
    Reply /

    Thanks! After much searching, this is what I needed!

  3. Ebony  - November 26, 2016 - 08:13
    Reply /

    That’s a wellt-hought-out answer to a challenging question

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