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After an... ahem... incident involving an ill-judged rm -rf
, it occurred to me that if you have administrator permissions on your Windows machine, working within a Cygwin terminal is the equivalent of using a root shell in Unix.
This can have unfortunate consequences, such as... accidentally wiping your entire filesystem with an ill-judged rm -rf
.
So, my question is: while logged in from a Windows account with administrator permissions, how can I limit cygwin's permissions, in a manner analogous to running under a user account instead of root on Unix systems?
What I would like is to have write permission to my own files in the folders where I do my work, but get "Permission denied" errors whenever I (accidentally) write things in places I shouldn't be touching such as /cygdrive/c/Windows.
I have googled "cygwin permissions" and similar keywords, but only found people wanting to get more permission than cygwin is giving them.
Theres an article here about Windows security in Cygwin, but I can't understand it, probably because I don't understand Windows access control well enough...
Did you find a solution? – user – 2013-03-13T15:04:46.237
Not yet. I'll post it if I do. I'm thinking I should ask a general Windows question about how to limit the actions that a program can perform. – Andrew Spencer – 2013-03-14T10:09:13.180