Command to Change the Default Home Directory of a User

How to change default directory in Windows Subsystem for Linux

You should only change the startingDirectory for WSL (Ubuntu in this case) terminal sessions.

1. Open settings.json via CTRL+SHIFT+,
2. Make sure you are modifying startingDirectory under profiles/list/name: "Ubuntu"

Example below (the slashes need to be escaped):

....
{
    "guid": "{2c4de342-xxx-xxx-xxx-2309a097f518}",
    "hidden": false,
    "name": "Ubuntu",
    "source": "Windows.Terminal.Wsl",
    "startingDirectory": "\\\\wsl$\\Ubuntu\\home\\windows_username_in_lower_case"
},
....

Documentation about startingDirectory including default values and expected values.

Inside settings.json you will also find an explanation of the json schema which is here

If you need to know how or where to edit Windows Terminal settings/preferences: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/get-started

How to default to other directory instead of home directory

Just write that line to a file "cd.sh", then do this from your shell prompt:

. ./cd.sh

Or you can create an alias or function in your $HOME/.bashrc file:

foo() { cd /d/work_space_for_my_company/project/code_source ; }

If the directory name includes spaces or other shell metacharacters, you'll need quotation marks; it won't hurt to add them even if they're not necessary:

foo() { cd "/d/Work Space/project/code_source" ; }

(Note that I've omitted the ../../..; you don't need it.)

EDIT: If you add a line

foo

to your .bashrc after the function definition, your shell will start in that directory. Or you can just use the cd command directly in your .bashrc if you aren't going to need to use the function later.

(The name foo is just an example; you should pick a more meaningful name.)

Change the location of the ~ directory in a Windows install of Git Bash

I don't understand, why you don't want to set the $HOME environment variable since that solves exactly what you're asking for.

cd ~ doesn't mean change to the root directory, but change to the user's home directory, which is set by the $HOME environment variable.

Quick'n'dirty solution

Edit C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile and set $HOME variable to whatever you want (add it if it's not there). A good place could be for example right after a condition commented by # Set up USER's home directory. It must be in the MinGW format, for example:

HOME=/c/my/custom/home

Save it, open Git Bash and execute cd ~. You should be in a directory /c/my/custom/home now.

Everything that accesses the user's profile should go into this directory instead of your Windows' profile on a network drive.

Note: C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile is shared by all users, so if the machine is used by multiple users, it's a good idea to set the $HOME dynamically:

HOME=/c/Users/$USERNAME

Cleaner solution

Set the environment variable HOME in Windows to whatever directory you want. In this case, you have to set it in Windows path format (with backslashes, e.g. c:\my\custom\home), Git Bash will load it and convert it to its format.

If you want to change the home directory for all users on your machine, set it as a system environment variable, where you can use for example %USERNAME% variable so every user will have his own home directory, for example:

HOME=c:\custom\home\%USERNAME%

If you want to change the home directory just for yourself, set it as a user environment variable, so other users won't be affected. In this case, you can simply hard-code the whole path:

HOME=c:\my\custom\home

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