To change this current working directory, you can use the "cd" command (where "cd" stands for "change directory").
I don't understand, why you don't want to set the $HOME
environment variable since that solves exactly what you're asking for.
cd ~
doesn't mean change to the root directory, but change to the user's home directory, which is set by the $HOME
environment variable.
Edit C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile
and set $HOME
variable to whatever you want (add it if it's not there). A good place could be for example right after a condition commented by # Set up USER's home directory
. It must be in the MinGW format, for example:
HOME=/c/my/custom/home
Save it, open Git Bash and execute cd ~
. You should be in a directory /c/my/custom/home
now.
Everything that accesses the user's profile should go into this directory instead of your Windows' profile on a network drive.
Note: C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile
is shared by all users, so if the machine is used by multiple users, it's a good idea to set the $HOME
dynamically:
HOME=/c/Users/$USERNAME
Set the environment variable HOME
in Windows to whatever directory you want. In this case, you have to set it in Windows path format (with backslashes, e.g. c:\my\custom\home
), Git Bash will load it and convert it to its format.
If you want to change the home directory for all users on your machine, set it as a system environment variable, where you can use for example %USERNAME%
variable so every user will have his own home directory, for example:
HOME=c:\custom\home\%USERNAME%
If you want to change the home directory just for yourself, set it as a user environment variable, so other users won't be affected. In this case, you can simply hard-code the whole path:
HOME=c:\my\custom\home
In my case, all I had to do was add the following User variable on Windows:
Variable name: HOME
Variable value: %USERPROFILE%
How to set a Environment Variable (You can use the User variables for username section if you are not a system administrator)
I'd share what I did, which works not only for Git, but MSYS/MinGW as well.
The HOME
environment variable is not normally set for Windows applications, so creating it through Windows did not affect anything else. From the Computer Properties (right-click on Computer - or whatever it is named - in Explorer, and select Properties, or Control Panel -> System and Security -> System), choose Advanced system settings
, then Environment Variables...
and create a new one, HOME
, and assign it wherever you like.
If you can't create new environment variables, the other answer will still work. (I went through the details of how to create environment variables precisely because it's so dificult to find.)
Instead of modifying the global profile
you could create the .bash_profile
in your default $HOME
directory (e.g. C:\Users\WhateverUser\.bash_profile
) with the following contents:
export HOME="C:\my\projects\dir"
cd "$HOME" # if you'd like it to be the starting dir of the git shell
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