home dir in cygwin

[Michael Bovee]

> I don't use a Mac but my understanding is that MacOS
> X is basically just Mach with a BSD-style personality
> called Darwin.  As apparent confirmation of that,
> the guy at the desk next to me (who's running MacOS X)
> just now cat'd out the /etc/passwd file on his machine
> at my request.

My /etc/passwd is not blank. Here's the comments I find on MacOSX 
(10.2.2)

##
# User Database
#
# Note that this file is consulted when the system is running in 
single-user
# mode.  At other times this information is handled by lookupd.  By 
default,
# lookupd gets information from NetInfo, so this file will not be 
consulted
# unless you have changed lookupd's configuration.
##

> Note that he'd never had occasion to
> care about it before this and wasn't even sure it
> would be there, though he's built code with gcc on
> that machine and even installed Debian packages on it.

I do this all the time, thanks to the sourceforge project, fink.
http://fink.sf.net
A real lifesaver and low-stress way to learn, for installing ported 
open source software (over 2100 packages so far). I just installed Open 
Office today, and I'm trying to learn about how to make a script that 
will run the setenv commands to launch the app, without putting this 
stuff in my ~/.cshrc

--Michael