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

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