File Sys Hierarchies

[T. William Wells]

In article <5748 at rpi.edu> night at pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin) writes:
: In article <20140 at adm.BRL.MIL> rbj at dsys.ncsl.nist.gov (Root Boy Jim) writes:
: >Another annoying thing is that the superuser's home directory is `/'.
: >This make it difficult to have a private bin directory and use the
: >same .cshrc and .login scripts as my user account.
:
: Is there any good reason to leave root's home directory as "/"?  Or
: is this just another convention that's been around so long that no one's
: bothered to change it?

Well, you want root's home directory to be on the boot file system so
that root is not dependent on other file systems.

My solution is this: in /.profile, I check to see if there is a
/usr/home/root directory. If not, I leave the home directory as /. If
there is, I fake things so that /usr/home/root becomes the root home
directory. Programs generally useful to root that aren't needed when
/usr is down go in /usr/home/root/bin; those needed under all
conditions go in /etc/bin.

(Yeah, I'd probably do it differently if I had symbolic links.)

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Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill at twwells.com