Cygwin: Your group is currently “mkpasswd”

February 11, 2010 · Posted in Cygwin · 3 Comments 

I just updated my cygwin environment and started receiving following errors upon login to console:

Your group is currently “mkpasswd”.  This indicates that your
gid is not in /etc/group and your uid is not in /etc/passwd.

The /etc/passwd (and possibly /etc/group) files should be rebuilt.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run

mkpasswd -l [-d] > /etc/passwd
mkgroup  -l [-d] > /etc/group

Note that the -d switch is necessary for domain users.

To resolve the problem, simply follow the direction above.

$ mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd

$ mkgroup -l > /etc/group
$

That is all.