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I use Cygwin as my main development environment on both my home and work computers.

In order to share files between the two computers, I use Dropbox, which is installed in the following folder on both computers: c:\cygwin\home\dvanaria\dropbox

Everything works great, except for one thing. When I'm working on my home computer and do an ls -l on any directory, all the files show up as owned by dvanaria of group Users. But when I work from my work computer, an ls -l shows all files as being owned by Administrators and of group Domain Users.

I know Cygwin uses some kind of mapping between Windows users and permissions to the /etc/passwd file. But to be honest I have no idea how this file works or how it maps to Windows under Cygwin.

Could anyone help figure this out? The main problem is that I can't edit any files when using my work computer, only read them.

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  • How did you setup dropbox? A correctly setup dropbox should change the ownership of the files to the correct user on each machine (by nature of being installed by the correct user and downloading the files from the server as such). Jul 2, 2012 at 15:18

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First, those files are not the same files on the two computers. Dropbox is simply making copies between computers. There is no real file sharing (in the Windows sense of a "share") going on. Second, since you are two different users on the two different computers, it shouldn't be surprising that the files are owned by different users on the two different computers.

Now you might ask why does your work machine show the owner as group Administrators but your home machine doesn't? Windows has a local security policy that governs whether newly created files are owned by the user who creates them or group Administrators (if the user is a member of group Administrators). Obviously, that policy differs between the two machines. Also, your work machine may have that policy enforced by the domain controller, so you may not be able to change it.

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  • I neglected to add that this has nothing to do with Cygwin. It's the nature of Windows.
    – Fran
    Jul 3, 2012 at 0:04

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