[TUHS] The origin of /home

[Norman Wilson]

Dave Horsfall:

  Before I started using /home (Slowaris had yet to appear), I used /u/* 
  instead (I didn't want to pollute /usr with home directories).

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I'm late to the party, but I'll chime in too:

The first UNIX system I ever used, ca. 1980, had users' home
directories in /u.  I suspect it was that way (as suggested
in some earlier messages) just for storage management: separate
file system from /usr.

I've carried /u around with me ever since to other systems
I've set up from scratch, except in my home environment
where I've made a radical departure: everything that isn't
part of the base OS is in a tree rooted at /con, so home
directories are /con/u.  /con was `constant,' inspired
by /var, meaning stuff that should be preserved when the OS
is reinstalled--everything else should come from installation
media or configuration management.

But in any case there's nothing especially novel about moving
users' home directories out of /usr, and since it's UNIX,
nothing that says there has to be any standard at all.  On
the systems I am currently paid to help run, most users have
home-directory names like /h/u12/c4/00/c4ntest.  There is no
attempt to glue together a single name hierarchy; we have in
excess of 17000 users so that would be something of a mess.
(I guess enormous directories aren't the resource pigs they
used to be, though symlinks are just as bad as they have
ever been.)  There's the ~user shell syntax for those who like
that; I don't, but I have a little shell script in my personal
bin directory so I can do things like ls `home c4ntest`; it all
just works.

I once thought of writing a paper entitled `/usr and /etc
considered harmful,' in which I would have proposed:

a.  It no longer matters a whit whether the (real) root file
system can fit into a 5MB slice of the disk or the like, so
just merge everything that spilled into /usr in the tiny-disk
days back into the root where it belongs.
b.  /etc is largely junk.  Executables have long since moved
into /sbin.  Pretty much everything else that's there belongs
(according to the original scheme, not the latter-day complications
inflicted by those who didn't understand) in /lib.

Unfortunately all the quick hacks and poorly-considered tweaks
of the past have long since been cast in stone by widespread
convention, so it's fruitless to try to clean any of this up.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON