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I'm using MSYS (MinGW UNIX environment) to get a working UNIX-like environment on my Windows 7 workstation. When I start the MinGW shell, I can see that my home directory is /home/oded.a, and running mount shows me that it comes from msys\1.0 under the MinGW installation directory.

It works fine and I can put files there, write and read them using the MSYS environment utilities and shells, but when I open the Windows 7 file explorer and browse to msys\1.0, I can't see a directory named home and I would really like to be able to access my MSYS home files using Windows tools. Any idea where the home directory is actually stored?

This is the output of mount on my system:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MinGW\msys\1.0 on /usr type user (binmode,noumount)
C:\Program Files (x86)\MinGW\msys\1.0 on / type user (binmode,noumount)
C:\Users\oded.a\AppData\Local\Temp on /tmp type user (binmode,noumount)
c: on /c type user (binmode,noumount)
q: on /q type user (binmode,noumount)

2 Answers 2

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$ pwd -W
C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/home/Steven
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  • Thanks. I no longer have this setup, but this is indeed what I was looking for.
    – Guss
    May 28, 2012 at 17:01
  • Oh, -W option for pwd? Nice. This revealed that my MINGW home is the same as my Windows User home, but the keygen still have not placed the SSH keys inside .ssh directory, it was just laying in the home root.
    – Csaba Toth
    Jan 28, 2019 at 20:43
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Sometimes there is a case that MinGW/MSYS does create home folder in ~/msys/1.0/home/user (user is my user name)

The following is what I discovered.

MinGW/MSYS usually creates a home folder under C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/home/user if you installed them as usual (accepting the defaults) and you executed msys.bat successfully. However, it does not create it where you expect if you happened to have an environment variable called HOME.

  • Optionally, first check your home folder by $pwd -W ($ is a command prompt.)
  • Remove the environment variable called HOME. (It does not mess up Windows.")
  • Reboot
  • Execute msys.bat again.
  • Optionally, now check where your home folder by $pwd -W
  • Note: Don't need to reinstall MinGW/MSYS.

(a debtor)<><

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