Re: [TUHS] The origin of /home

Dave Horsfall: Before I started using /home (Slowaris had yet to appear), I used /u/* instead (I didn't want to pollute /usr with home directories). === I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in too: The first UNIX system I ever used, ca. 1980, had users' home directories in /u. I suspect it was that way (as suggested in some earlier messages) just for storage management: separate file system from /usr. I've carried /u around with me ever since to other systems I've set up from scratch, except in my home environment where I've made a radical departure: everything that isn't part of the base OS is in a tree rooted at /con, so home directories are /con/u. /con was `constant,' inspired by /var, meaning stuff that should be preserved when the OS is reinstalled--everything else should come from installation media or configuration management. But in any case there's nothing especially novel about moving users' home directories out of /usr, and since it's UNIX, nothing that says there has to be any standard at all. On the systems I am currently paid to help run, most users have home-directory names like /h/u12/c4/00/c4ntest. There is no attempt to glue together a single name hierarchy; we have in excess of 17000 users so that would be something of a mess. (I guess enormous directories aren't the resource pigs they used to be, though symlinks are just as bad as they have ever been.) There's the ~user shell syntax for those who like that; I don't, but I have a little shell script in my personal bin directory so I can do things like ls `home c4ntest`; it all just works. I once thought of writing a paper entitled `/usr and /etc considered harmful,' in which I would have proposed: a. It no longer matters a whit whether the (real) root file system can fit into a 5MB slice of the disk or the like, so just merge everything that spilled into /usr in the tiny-disk days back into the root where it belongs. b. /etc is largely junk. Executables have long since moved into /sbin. Pretty much everything else that's there belongs (according to the original scheme, not the latter-day complications inflicted by those who didn't understand) in /lib. Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks of the past have long since been cast in stone by widespread convention, so it's fruitless to try to clean any of this up. Norman Wilson Toronto ON