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Cygwin does not have its own accounts. The only accounts on the system are the Windows accounts, with the Windows passwords. If you wanted there to be an account called "root", then you could use Windows to create an account called "root", but there would be nothing special about it, it would just be another user account with a funny name. Any regular Windows user that has admin access will have "root" privileges in Cygwin.
in windows you have a right-click/run-as menu to execute anything using another account. Cygwin has no such feature, but obviously you can try to find out the action behind that menu and start it from cygwin
it is not possible. the only way to change user on windows is to use the "run as" menu. If you need admin rights you need to set it using windows tools.
I can't seem to find any cygwin forums anywhere and was hoping someone here could help me out since cygwin emulates linux. When I do 'su' in cygwin I get "user root does not exist." I was trying to switch to root because I was hoping it would fix another problem I've been having with cygwin. Everything that gets created from cygwin is read-only. Does anyone know how to fix either of these problems?
edit* Welll I found that su isn't ported, but still don't get why cygwin makes everything read only.
The point is that cygwin gives you the cmd line env (on top of MSWin) that you'd find in Linux ... It does NOT install Linux, so you won't find eg 'root' user etc ...
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