[philzilla]

i was just wondering why Apple chose to name our home directory /Users, and not /home, like the thread title says. is this the only version of unix without a /home directory?

no big deal, really. i'm just curious. anyone got an ideas?

[proton]

/Users sounds a lot nicer for people to look at in the GUI.

There is nothing to say that user's home directories should be in /home, many of the Unix systems I've used over time have either not had a /home, or had an empty one.

- proton

[kvm_mkdb]

Originally posted by philzilla:
i was just wondering why Apple chose to name our home directory /Users, and not /home, like the thread title says. is this the only version of unix without a /home directory?

IRIX (Silicon Graphics UNIX) puts the home directories by default in /usr/people .

Unlike /usr, /var, etc. /home is not mandatory, it's just a convention. NeXT/Apple opted for /User so it would match the other uppercase, user-serviceable directories (/Library, etc.) and distinguish it from the 'hidden' UNIX-y stuff, relegated in the lowercase directories.

[superlarry]

also, what would happen if you told a n00b to go to his/her home folder? they'd probably choose the one called "home," not the one with their username.

[Moonray]

Both would make sense to name the place for the users' home folders. Seen from top, Users sounds a bit more plausible to me. And yes, starting with an uppercase letter it fits better to the naming of the other directories/folders.

-

[utidjian]

Apple could have named it just about anything. /Users is fine for a smallish system with a handful of users.

If one sets up a host in Solaris it puts users home folders in /exports/home. Linux in /home. I have seen BSDs with /h/domain, /home/staff, /home/student, /u1/home, /u2/home, and whatnot. Most of those systems have several thousand user accounts. Most of the naming conventions relates more to how the volumes are mounted and exported.

For the most part it is completely meaningless to the *user* where their home folder is in the naming scheme or in the directory heirarchy for a multiuser networked Unix system. When the user logs in they are where they are supposed to be... in their home folder. All their files and folders that they interact with directly are located there. However they interact with their data (login on console, ssh, ftp, scp, whatever) they are always in /whatever/wherever/userid. This is often called transparency.

People (users) are funny... try to explain to them that their files in their home folder is actually yards to miles away on a server and available to them anywhere at any time and their eyes glaze over. All they need to know and care about is that wherever they are in the organization... whatever client machine they are logged in at... their desktop, prefs, and files are all "right there". It is 2004, Unix has been doing this for just about 20 years now.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by philzilla:
...
is this the only version of unix without a /home directory?

In general, the one true thing about Unix machines is that they all do things differently. Nowadays people think that Linux == Unix the way it has always been, which is of course not true. The important thing is not where Apple put the users home directories, but rather that conventions such as ~ and ~user and the like refer to the correct directory.

[suthercd]

Looking through the documentation of discussions, papers, meeting notes from the 1999-2000 time period there was a lot of work to hammer out how to weave traditional BSD format and conventions with a GUI that would not require *nix knowledge on the part of the user.

Fun to read that stuff-- people involved on all sides were sure determined to work things out and keep plugging away.

Craig

[philzilla]

i love the answers, guys. this forum tells it like it is, with no messing around.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Mac OS 9 convention.
/Users was the default for Multiple Logins in the Macintosh OS before OS X was on the market, so they decided to keep it.

[ShyGuy91284]

True that Linux != UNIX, but in that mid area (between the code and the actual user side of the system) they are similar enough so that they can be clunked together in most cases with the file systems, POSIX extensions, and other things... Funny how they can be so similar "on the lowest level", yet still most likely be nothing alike when you get down to their source code.

[Chuckit]

Holy zombie thread, Batman!