"/home" vs. "/Users" directories under Leopard

tsferreira

Registered
I was using until recently a PowerPC running Mac OS X 10.4.11. Since I maintain my directories synchronized all the time between Linux running on another machine and this PowerPC, I created a link:

/home -> /Users

so that all my scrpits and links (like /home/....) would work properly under both systems.

I acquired recently an iMac running under Mac OS 10.5.3 and discovered that there exists already a directory called "/home" which has a rather strange behaviour: not even the user 'root' is allowed to write into it or to modify it in any way, orv to remove it! This breaks many of my scripts.

Of course I can go the opposite way and create under my Linux a link: /Users->/home, but some of my scripts create automatically links like "/home/..." because they expand "~/..." and these would give me troubles on the iMac. I wrote a script which goes through my directory and changes all my links, but it does not seem to be the right way.

Any explanation and suggestions will be appreciated.

-- Tom
 
/home is owned by root, and I would not recommend chowning it modifying it otherwise.

What you probably want is your home folder, so ~ which would be /Users/yourusername.
 
Yes that's obvious but it does not solve the problem. This difference between Mac OS and usual Linux/Unix installations makes things more complicated for users of multiple machines and operating systems. In case of Windows this would be a minor issue because it is so different to start with; however Mac OS is a Unix-like!
 
Yes that's obvious but it does not solve the problem. This difference between Mac OS and usual Linux/Unix installations makes things more complicated for users of multiple machines and operating systems. In case of Windows this would be a minor issue because it is so different to start with; however Mac OS is a Unix-like!

Emphasis on the "like" part of that word. That doesn't necessarily mean that it has to conform completely to the traditional Unix hierarchy. Nonetheless, asof Leopard it is still officially considered a UNIX like the other proprietary UNIX solutions out there since it conforms to The Open Group's UNIX specifications.
 
Sorry but this is a somewhat bureaucratic answer. So far I did not see a technical explanation for the existence of this strange empty directory "/home" which cannot be modified even by the 'root'. It did not exist under Mac OS 10.4 (at least not under the one running on PowerPC). What is its purpose?
 
Sorry but this is a somewhat bureaucratic answer. So far I did not see a technical explanation for the existence of this strange empty directory "/home" which cannot be modified even by the 'root'. It did not exist under Mac OS 10.4 (at least not under the one running on PowerPC). What is its purpose?

It might be a bureaucratic answer, but it doesn't negate what I said. Consider that NetInfo also does not exist anymore in Leopard.

Of course, a simple Google search for "home directory in Leopard" provided me the following link in another forum. Did you try going this route before asking here and refuting everyone's answers?
 
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