Today’s article will not be long, nor will it be a complicated article, as we learn how to locate your home directory. This is something you probably already know, but you may encounter a strange system where things are a little different. It can happen.
More importantly, this article is going to try something new. Rather than a very long article, it’s going to be a short article. Well, shorter than most – assuming I stop puffing it up with text such as this. Why? Well, I want to see the reception and the statistics.
So, basically, every user account you’re likely to use should have a home directory. This is where the user’s files, customizations, and settings reside. Not every user has a home directory, but the accounts you’d normally use (that is log into and operate) will likely have such a directory. However, you don’t have to have a home directory – though you can expect some weirdness without one.
How To: Create a New User Without a /home Directory
The usual home directory will be in /home/<user> and that’s pretty much the standard we’ve come to know and love. You really shouldn’t need to locate your home directory, but there comes a time when you just might want to.
So, that’s what this article covers. It covers how to…
Locate Your Home Directory:
So, we’ll be doing this in the terminal. That’s a nice place to do things. Press
Nah, just open it from your application menu and love the distro you’ve chosen.
We’ll just be covering a couple of quick ways to locate your home directory. That’s all this article is and there’s no reason to turn it into a longer article. We’ll do them both with the echo command. See man echo for more details.
First, you can try this command:
1 | echo ~ |
As you should know by now, the tilde (~) is a shortcut for your home directory and it works just fine in this use case.
There’s another echo command you can memorize, but slightly longer:
1 | echo $HOME |
That command uses both the echo command and an environment variable, specifically $HOME (obviously). This will happily echo the results, sending them to your standard output. This can be quite useful if you’re into scripting or the like.
See also:
How To: Show All Environment Variables
I told you that this wouldn’t be long or complicated. You can now locate your home directory from the Linux terminal.
Closure:
As I said, I figured I’d try the opposite of what I’ve been trying lately. My most recent articles have been quite long and quite detailed. I like them. I enjoy writing them. This time around, it seemed like a good idea to try something different with a subject that benefits from brevity.
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