More opinion, unencumbered by facts. /usr contained many sudirectories, like /usr/bin and /usr/lib, that were essential to an operational OS. Home directories, on the other hand, persisted unchanged when new releases of an OS were installed. Some of us had symlinks from /usr into a separate file system to make the distinction easier to maintain across releases. On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 8:58 AM, Donald ODona <mutiny.mutiny(a)india.com> wrote:

Another reason why the home directory part of /usr was made into /home is because after doing so, it was possible to mount /usr read-only, and supply it from a server. This was the so-called "dataless" method. I wrote a short email message summarizing what we were doing with this in UC Berkeley Comp. Sci., and mentioning a paper I had written describing how to create a "dataless" environment for DEC's OSF1 operating system (see http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2008-July/022210.html) Jon Forrest

On 9/27/2018 7:28 AM, Arrigo Triulzi wrote: Right, and I am that Jon Forrest It's been a while, but what I remember is that DEC actually published their own method for doing this but it was surprisingly cumbersome. What I described was incredibly simple but effective. I ran many Alphas this way with no problems at all. Jon

On 9/27/2018 8:54 AM, Arrigo Triulzi wrote: That's OK. I do things like that at least once a day. Those were the days when DEC would tell you all kinds of things. I remember in the late 80s they told me that TCP/IP wasn't going to catch on, and that I should stick with DecNet. I actually started my dataless design back when we were running Ultrix. It worked fine there too, although back then 10Mbs networking was common so it wasn't super speedy. Of course, neither were the workstations. The document I quoted also described how the CS department used an Auspex file server to serve what we called the "Software Warehouse", which was a collection of open source software that we built for all the popular architectures then. Jon

Surely /home come out of the automounter convention to point /home/<foo> at whichever /export/<host>/<filesystem>/<homedir> directory YP said was the logged in users home directory? This all originates from the days of diskless/dataless Sun workstations. --lyndon

On 10/09/2018 08:38 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: As am I. @thatcks on Twitter indicates that they still use /u/$USER on their systems. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Thanks for such an interesting and informative answer, Mr. Cross. Dan Cross wrote: Do I understand it correctly: they were in just "slash a/b/etc" in root? Not /home/a or /usr/a but just /a? 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

I wish I could remember exactly everything happened, but I cannot say I do. Dan Cross, Don and Noel have all said things that line up with what I remember. I’m actually thinking the /home came out of a set of discussions that occurred before what would eventually be called UNIX International. As, Noel says, I do remember using the term ‘home directory’ as a student, so it is likely that was a term being used either by the old PDP-10 or IBM shops; but like Noel, I cannot pin the term down either. Don noted that the /home does not come to the BSD strain until 1986, which also makes sense; because one of the goals of 4.3BSD was to try to make BSD a little less divergent from the other UNIX paths, and one of the things Keith did was to start to made an effort to try use some of the same conventions the industry (Sun and AT&T in particular) were using. Dan Cross made the most important note and that is that in the early days the size a disk was quite small. UNIX Sixth and Seventh edition often ran on systems that 2 or 3 RK05 drives of 2.5M each [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RK05] and as Dan point out, there were limits to the what got put in the what file system. Simply the guiding principle at that time was that you stored in the root filesystem; just enough to the boot the system, pushed everything else to /usr and then used UNIX mount/name space splicing/path mechanisms to make a uniform set of paths. BTW: A thing to remember is that symbolic links are not a wide spread when all of this was going on in the early 1980s, so they really did not have a lot to do with the /home idea. In the case of symbolic links, Dennis had created them as part of V8, but 4.1BSD and System III (PWB 3.0) did not have the idea yet. BSD 4.2 would later get them as part of FFS, but I don’t remember if 4.1c did (the kernel source was not in Warren’s browsable archive so I could not check). Dennis had showed them to me on a visit, I thought they were cool and useful, and put them in Masscomp’s RTU (which was a System III/4.1 mash up) and then created CDL’s shortly thereafter which we used for what later Pyramid called Universes (we called it modes originally but started calling it universes also because it sounded cooler). Sun picked up symlinks when they went to the 4.2 kernel and BSD FFS. The other missing item was quotas. The universities in particular needed quotas, which is one of the reasons why Joy added it to 4.2, as it was a requested feature by the DARPA community. Before 4.2, people used the partition size within the disk as a way to have some sort of quotas. So what happened? The factiod no one has brought up so far is what would become the /usr/group standards committee (later Unix International (UI) and before that was the work Heinz Lycklama and Peter Weiner were doing at Interactive Systems Corp (ISC). Heinz wanted an industry wide ABI and was pretty vocal about it. He felt the ISVs would never take UNIX seriously if there were not ‘one true >>binary<< system’ that they compiled too. The /usr/group API work got started from that and was the compromise, a programming interface, not an binary one. But during the discussions that led up to the standards committee was a series of meetings originally at USENIX ATC, where we began to talk about the naming conventions. They were trying to agree what needs to be in /bin, /usr/bin, /lib, /usr/lib etc… and to make them more 'readonly-ish' primarily so that programs that went amok, did the least amount of damage. This was also where the idea of /usr/opt and /var were born. /usr/local was a UCB-ism, but people used it for stuff the built themselves. Most installed systems /usr1 /usr2 … where the actual user files were stored. The commercial folks wanted it more like other systems were there were some sorts of fences around things. But …it was basically agreed by the commercial side, that if there ever were going to be any hope for the ISVs to be able to ship a binary, each ISV needed her/his own spot. The idea for them was /usr/opt/hp, /usr/opt/intel, /usr/opt/msft and then under that the usual bin, etc, include, lib, … Equally /var was deal with things like logs which were being to show up (the printer and shell accounting were first), but that way ISVs and random programs did not step on each other. I think HP might have actuallybeen the first of the vendors to start to ship using that convention, but USL did pick it up by the time of System V. Similarly, at some point the /usr1, /usr2 etc … switched to /home /home1 /home2 etc… I do remember that there HP guys where pretty vocal in the arguments when it all went down. There was (should be) an email/netnews article kicking around with the name something like ‘standardized UNIX file tree’ or some such. I would think this was about 1984 or 1985 time frame. This email/article was part of the model that Keith used for 4.3BSD later on; but it is also where my memory gets hazy and I lost those notebooks in the flood. I cannot swear by it, but I do seem to think I remember that /home was one of the directories that came out of that discussion. The timing is certainly right, as is the reasoning. ᐧ

Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The /a convention seems to go back quite a long way. I was looking through old password files to see where the home directories were, e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.1cBSD/etc/passwd has a lot of /a/guest whereas 4.3BSD has /usr/guest Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch &lt;dot(a)dotat.at&gt; http://dotat.at/ safeguard the balance of nature and the environment

On 9/28/2018 12:15 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: Solaris 10 u10: beef / # useradd asdf beef / # grep asdf /etc/passwd asdf:x:504:1::/home/asdf:/bin/sh Solaris 11.3: medusa# useradd asdf medusa# grep asdf /etc/passwd asdf:x:65540:10::/export/home/asdf:/usr/bin/bash When creating a user on Solaris 11, because it requires you to install a regular user because you can't login directly as root, it creates the home directory in /export/home Interesting. To be honest, I did not expect Solaris 10 to use /home as the default.

On 09/28/2018 11:28 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote: Were those fresh installs to test things for this discussion? Or were they existing installs that you checked? If they were fresh installs, were they larger kitchen sink type installs? Or minimal installs? -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 28/09/2018, Grant Taylor via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org&gt; wrote: : A home directory can be located either on the user's local system or on a remote file server. In either case, by convention the home directory should be created as /export/home/username. For a large site, you should store home directories on a server. Use a separate file system for each /export/homen directory to facilitate backing up and restoring home directories. For example, /export/home1, /export/home2. Regardless of where their home directory is located, users usually access their home directories through a mount point named /home/username. When AutoFS is used to mount home directories, you are not permitted to create any directories under the /home mount point on any system. The system recognizes the special status of /home when AutoFS is active.