how to access different directories outside cygwin home dir

Question

I have installed dropbox in my computer, but it is located outside my cygwin directory. The probably easiest way would be to just move the dropbox directory to cygwin's home dir. Anyway I wonder if it is possible to browse to my dropbox directory from cygwin instead?

Answer 1

You can access the root of your C: drive, for example, from cygwin by specifying the directory /cygdrive/c, e.g.,

$ cd /cygdrive/c

Similarly, the path to any file on your C: drive can be constructed by prefixing the Windows path (without the "C:" and with \s changed to /s) with /cygdrive/c, so C:\Dropbox\myfile would be accessed from within Cygwin as /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/myfile.

Answer 2

If you really wanted it available in Cygwin, besides getting it directly (as @garyjohn's correct answer) you can also try to use the mount command to map the path to your home dir. Something like this may work.

mount C:\dropbox\cygwin /home/me/dropbox

I say may, because though I'm pretty sure it will work, I have no Cygwin install to test it, and I'm not sure if Cygwin will refuse to create it because of filesystem loops (it should allow it)

Answer 3

As @starcorn mentions above, ln works great for this.

$ ln -sv /cygdrive/c/Users/JohnWagg/Dropbox/ ~/dropbox
`/home/JohnWagg/dropbox' -> `/cygdrive/c/Users/JohnWagg/Dropbox/'

Answer 4

cd "C:\users" works too. But, I think the method $ cd /cygdrive/c is much better and you can also put export C=/cygdrive/c in .bashrc file and use the command cd $C/ directly.

Answer 5

look for available drives by running: df -h
On Mounted On column you can see your already mounted drives. Go to them by using those path. Like in my case to go to F: drive, run cd /cygdrive/f.

Answer 6

Drag and drop the file you wish to run and there's no need to change working directory.

The way I change directory is by going one folder at a time. e.g:
cd C:
cd Users
cd Name
cd Documents

Then type
pwd
And it will show the directory you have entered.
/cygdrive/c/users/name/documents

You can also directly copy and paste the directory and just add cd before you hit Enter.

As I am using cygwin simple to run a linux batch processing file, I just drag the file into the terminal and it finds the directory and runs when you hit Enter.