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Why does OS X have the "/home" directory if it doesn't use it?

J

J the Ninja

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 14, 2008
1,824
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It uses /Users instead, so why is /home even there? There is nothing in it. What's it for?
 
What are you talking about? Everything is in the home folder:

Picture 7.png
 
No, open Terminal and type "ls /" - an empty directory called "home" shows up in the list. It doesn't show up in Finder since it's one of the hidden folders.

I never noticed it before. Not sure why it's there.
 
plinden said:
No, open Terminal and type "ls /" - an empty directory called "home" shows up in the list. It doesn't show up in Finder since it's one of the hidden folders.

I never noticed it before. Not sure why it's there.
Click to expand...

I see what you mean now. Why does it bother you? It's not creating a problem, is it?
 
I know what /home is for normally. However, it's fairly obvious OS X uses /Users in it's place. I am just a little curious as to why it is there anyway, if it's empty and superseded, and was wondering if anyone knew.
 
It's part of the Unix standard. And since OSX is a Unix flavored system it's just there.

When you use Apache web services in Unix the /home directory is the place users reside.

There are many pre-configured scripts in the Unix community that use the default /home directory.

In short it's easier for networking people to already have the /home directory there due to permissions.
 
Cromulent said:
I was correcting a point of interest. No one mentioned in this thread that / is called the root directory. I assumed (seemingly wrongly) that you would want to use the correct terminology in the future.
Click to expand...
I know what the root directory is. I simply misread the OP's original post and assumed he was using "home" to refer to "root", as many in the forum use incorrect terms, and replied using his terminology. When I realized what the OP was talking about, there was no need to "correct" the terminology, since the root directory was not being discussed.
 
Code: 
me@talkshowhost / > mount
/dev/disk0s1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
[B]map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)[/B]
 
How can i modify /home to add subdirectories?

So, as this thread points out, /home really exists on the mac (10.5 at least).

But how can i modify it? For example, add subdirectories?

Any command like

sudo touch /home/asdf

fails with an "Input/output error" (exit status 1).

The directory looks special, like some kind of strange mount point. But i have this piece of code i'd like to run on my mac, and it makes about a million hard-coded references to "/home". To run it, i think all i hafta do is dump some files in "/home", but that seems to be the one place on the system that i am absolutely forbidden from plopping files into.

Thanks in advance for any advice, including "read the fine manual" (but please tell me what page).

PS: i'd be willing to do some crazy things to write on /home, including buying a disk drive and mounting it on /home if i am not forbidden from it. I can't even remove /home in order to recreate it as a normal directory: "sudo rmdir /home" refuses to work ("Resource busy", busy doing something, i guess . . .).
 
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