Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
Isaac makes an important point (although I'm not sure it's the point he intended to make :) ), there is really nothing in the definition of UNIX itself that specifies or requires a home directory. It's a convention followed by shells, primarily.
$HOME is a convention too prevalent to not have one in a running system, unless you try really hard. But I've only seen it used for two things that I remember: - dot-files (and sometimes non-dot ones for IMHO ill-behaved programs) as a per-user search and automatic generation location - default location for shells (graphical file search as well as command-line) - which IMO should be controllable by a different variable - and '~' as a sort of synonym, I guess, even in some contexts that don't allow arbitrary environment variable substitution? any others? Isaac