Thanks for such an interesting and informative answer, Mr. Cross.
Dan Cross wrote:
4.4BSD had a convention of placing user home
directories in /a, /b,
etc.
Do I understand it correctly: they were in just "slash a/b/etc" in
root? Not /home/a or /usr/a but just /a?
4.4BSD-Lite also had /var/users.
Was it /var/users/$(user) or /var/$(user)?
To everyone: thanks for all the answers, it's always interesting to read
such things. I try not to miss a single mail after signing up for the
list.
This question actually came up long ago when I first tried Plan 9,
which, as you know, has the directory in /usr, and it was released in
90s, after 4.4BSD. Of course, Plan 9 is(not) (Research) Unix, and
doesn't have a root user, and apparently has a different rationale
behind it -- if I'm not mistaken, it has bin, lib and something else
there, none of which are usually present in /home these days, even bin
is usually in /usr/local.
--
caóc