| Home Directory |
Article Index for Home |
Website Links For Home |
Information AboutHome Directory |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HOME DIRECTORY | |
| computer file systems | |
|
Separating user data from system-wide data avoids redundancy and makes backups of important files relatively simple. Furthermore, Trojan Horse s, Virus es and Worm s running under the user's name and with their privileges will in most cases only be able to alter the files in the user's home directory, and perhaps some files belonging to workgroups the user is a part of, but not actual system files. IMPLEMENTATIONS On Bookmarks , favorite Desktop Wallpaper and Themes , Password s to any external services used by a given software, and so on. The user can also keep additional software which may not have been installed on the system as a whole. This directory will usually be organized with the use of sub-folders, at the user's preference. The content of one user's home directory is private and made unavailable to other users of the system (local or remote), protected by a mechanism of File System Permissions . Note however that anyone who has been allowed '' Superuser '' privilege, such as the system administrator, has authority to access any protected location on the Filesystem . The home directory is defined as part of the user's account data (e.g. in the system administration /etc /passwd file), as it is where a user's Focus is located upon Login in a Shell (as visible at the Command Line Interface prompt, or via the "'' Pwd ''" command). On many systems - including most distributions of Linux and variants of BSD (e.g. OpenBSD ) - the home directory for each user takes the form /home/''username'' (where ''username'' is the name of the user account). The home directory of the superuser account (usually named Root ) is traditionally / , but on many newer systems it is located at /root (Linux, BSD), or /var /root ( Mac OS X ). This convention is not universal, however: in NeXTSTEP , OPENSTEP , and Mac OS X , users' home directories are stored in /Users/''username''. However in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP in a single user, non-networked setup, there is a restricted me account in tandem with the standard unrestricted root account, which stores its users' files in /me. In Solaris , home directories are located in /home, but this is actually the mount point of the Automounter , which mounts home directories as needed from a file server, or /export/home on the local system. Older Unix systems often used paths such as /u01 or /var /users. An additional Unix naming convention (originating from the Csh shell) is that ~user can be used as shorthand for referring to the home directory belonging to user, whatever its location on the filesystem. This is why many Web Server s are configured to show a user's personal Website when a URL such as http://www.catb.org/~esr/ is accessed (in this example, the username is esr). A further shorthand allows a user to refer to their ''own'' home directory simply as ~. In %HOMEPATH% is used so that the correct directory can always be found. In the VMS operating system, a user's home directory is called the "root directory" (which means the top of the file hierarchy in Unix, and the root directory of a partition in DOS/Windows/AmigaOS), and the equivalent of a DOS/Windows/AmigaOS "root directory" is referred to as the Master File Directory. Single-user operating systems (which may be used by more than one person, but which are called "single-user" because they do not differentiate between different owners' files) typically do not have home directories, though they may have separate disks or partitions which may or may not be used for this purpose. For example, AmigaOS versions 2 and up have "System" and "Work" partitions on hard disks by default. The BeOS (and its successors) have a /home directory which contain the files belonging to the single user of the system. SEE ALSO |
|
|