Classnotes | UNIX01 | RecentChanges | Preferences Each user on the system has what is known as their "home directory". This is a directory owned by them which they may have exclusive write access to (depending how you have set up your users). The home directory will contain personal settings, files, and folders.
One of the more unfortunate things is that, like /usr and /opt, there is no "real" standard location for user's home directories. Most UNIX and Linuxes come with /home set up as the user home directory parent, which means if we had the users "bob", "sue", and "fred", we would have:
/home/bob
/home/fred
/home/sue
However, some sysadmins prefer to instead place the home directories under /usr1, /usr2, /usr3, etc. Here, the motivation is that you have a finer degree of control than you otherwise would with just /home.
In this class, I will stick with using /home as the parent directory for user's homepages, but it is worth mentionning that alternatives exist (especially if you are working with some sort of UNIX greybeard ;-)
root's home directory
The super-user's home directory is located typically in /root. For security reasons, this directory should only be readable and writable by the root user.
Note that here we must avoid some confusion. The /root directory is not the same as the root (/) directory! /root is the home directory of root, and root is the parent directory of the file system!
