I can't see MSYS home directory under Windows 7's file explorer

Question

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)

Answer 1

$ pwd -W
C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/home/Steven

Answer 2

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)<><