Talk:Home directory

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Location Convention

Do other Unices really use the /home convention? On most non-Linux systems I've used, home directories were stored somewhere in /usr. Someone with more Unix experience might be able to clear that up. I've changed the statement to "On most Linux systems" for now.—Eloquence 07:37, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

OpenBSD uses /home/user, OPENSTEP/Mac OS X uses /Users/user, can't remember what it is under Solaris though... Dysprosia 07:45, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It would be nice to have a table for different operating systems. That could actually make this article useful .. ;-) —Eloquence 07:46, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

Actually most BSD systems ( and AFAIK solaris as well, though YMMV ) store home directories in /home - however that is by default a

symlink to /usr/home/ or /usr/u/,/exports/u/ or something similar. I have also seen some unices which had user files in /u/ (z/OS as far as I remember) 84.161.45.100 (talk) 21:53, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Knoppix info?

Does it seem to anyone else that the Knoppix 'Persistant Home Directory' section is a bit out of place? Of course it deals with home directories and all but it just seems better suited in the Knoppix article or perhaps as a 'See Also' entry. Leaving it in place for now but just wanted some feedback on what everyone felt about it. Edavis1979 23:29, 9 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I decided to WP:Be bold and move it here. It's not encyclopedic anyway, with first person "you" in it. --Unixguy 20:36, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Persistent home directory

With Knoppix, you can create what is known as a "Persistent Directory". You can store this directory almost anywhere ... on your hard drive, on a floppy, or a USB dongle device. Click on "Tux", the little penguin in the task bar at the bottom of the screen, pick "Configure" from the menu and then "Create Persistent Disk Image". You'll get a list of choices of where to store your Persistent/home directory file.

When Knoppix boots, it looks in a file on the CD called "/etc/skel" for instructions on how to build the desktop. Since your information has been not been written back to the CD file we'll have to tell Knoppix to find it in a different location. We do that with a "Cheat-Code". You've probably already used a "cheat" to change the language environment. We'll just add another one now

boot: knoppix lang=es home=scan at this stage the "=" sign still lives on the shifted 0 (zero) key

Note: In v.06 of the Hack, the "home=" is no longer necessary. Knoppix will do the search and find the file automatically at boot time.

"home=scan" will tell Knoppix to look on all the storage devices it knows about for a file called "knoppix.img". It will use this file to rebuild the "home" directory with all the parameters you've entered.

If this file becomes corrupted for any reason, you can safely remove it and create a new one. Try making a copy of the file with your initials as an extension. Then if you need to blow off the original, you can replace it with your copy just by changing the extension back to ".img". Keep a copy of this file laying around as a backup ... just in case.

Table?

Path	System	Variable
/home/Alice	Linux (FHS)	~, $HOME
/Users/Alice	NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and Mac OS X	~, $HOME
\Documents and Settings\Alice	Microsoft Windows	%HOMEPATH%
C:\Documents and Settings\Alice	Microsoft Windows	%UserProfile%

Private Home Directories in Linux

Actually, home directories are usually installed as "world readable". For example, if the Linux server is running a web server like Apache, the local users can have a web page located at /home/username/public_html.

It is a simple matter to make the entire user directory private, or to create a sub-directory which is private. In fact, on most Linux installs, I create a directory called "private" and set it so that only I have access to it. Jim Toothaker (talk) 15:41, 14 December 2007 (UTC)Lunarglow[reply]

Home vs. Documents

I think the statement "...home directory as My Documents" for Windows might be mixing up the home directory and documents directory. Many operating systems have a documents directory that sits in the home directory, but they are different directories. The home directory typically contains the documents directory plus other user directories, such as the desktop directory. - Dem Pilafian (talk) 03:10, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]