On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 8:11 AM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

Naming on Unix (and derived systems) is one of those things that has always had different schools of thought applied to it.

As has been pointed out, the original place for what we now refer to as "home" directories was /usr, though this may not be entirely accurate: it's my belief that PDP-7 Unix had separate directories for each user, but I don't think these were nested under a common 'usr' directory. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. The original impetus for moving things around was surely space considerations on early disk devices: Not only was space limited, but filesystems couldn't span devices (in the /dev sense) and often *partition* sizes on a single volume were fixed by the driver for the underlying storage device. In such a rigidly defined world, varying conventions would necessary evolve to work around the inevitable limitations, particular in sites with lots of users like universities and production-focused corporate groups, including the degeneration of `/usr` as purely holding user directories. One can easily imagine the conversation: "we're out of room on the root filesystem and I can't install this new program in /bin..." "Hmm. Well, we've got space in /usr: create /usr/bin and we'll fix up the difference in the shell by incorporating some notion of a search path for binaries." Similarly with lib, man, and all the rest of it. It's interesting that now /usr is most often devoid of user data; the intent behind the name seems to be justified after the fact by asserting that it contains programs, libraries and other data of interest to users (as opposed to administrators).

That explains why other things starting encroaching and eventually took over on /usr, but I think the provenance of "/home" specifically relates to an etymological question. At some point, the "user's directory" as  denoted in /etc/passwd became known as the "home directory." If that was common vernacular by the time that `/home` came around as a convention, then it seems a logical name stemming from that usage. The more intriguing possibility from the antiquarian point of view is whether someone coined "/home" and then THAT led to the rise of the "home directory" nomenclature. man(5) on 7th Edition calls that field the user's "initial working directory." The first time I see it called "home directory" in my cursory search is in 4.3 Reno.

I intentionally eschew /home on a few systems. 4.4BSD had a convention of placing user home directories in /a, /b, etc. 4.4BSD-Lite also had /var/users. Both of which I occasionally use.

        - Dan C.