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Locate Your Home Directory

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 CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. If it doesn’t open, pick a better distro!

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:

echo ~

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:

echo $HOME

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.

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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Navigate To The Start Or End Of The Line (In The Terminal)

Today is going to be another simple article, where you learn to navigate to the start or end of the line – in the terminal, of course. I’ve had some abdominal issues, so it seems like a good day for yet another accessible article.

Even though it’s an easy article, there will be many Linux users who don’t know this information. I’m not even sure how to describe it, thus the unwieldy article headline. So, if you want to navigate to the start or end of the line in the terminal, I’ll show you how.

This being Linux, there are so many ways to do this sort of stuff…

Imagine this:

You’re using Ubuntu and you want to update from within the terminal. So, you’ve typed the following:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Well, as you can see, the first instance of ‘sudo’ was spelled wrong – it’s missing a letter. You can reach over there and find the arrow buttons, navigate back to the start of the line, and fix it. Or, you can do the following:

Navigate To The Start Or End Of The Line:

As the title indicates, this is in the terminal. As such, you’ll need an open terminal to try this out. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, why don’t we just use that line from above:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Of course, you could just look at your keyboard and (probably) use the HOME button to navigate to the start of the line. Of course, you could then use the END button to navigate to the end of the line. If you’re on a laptop, those keys can be placed most anywhere, though it’s far more standardized with a regular keyboard.

But, you don’t have to reach for those lines. Nope. That is not necessary. You can keep your eyes right on the screen. How so?

Well, it’s this easy:

To navigate to the start of the line, press CTRL + A.

To navigate to the end of the line, press CTRL + E.

Tada! You don’t have to root around for the home or end buttons. You don’t have to fuss with the arrow buttons. You can quickly and easily navigate to the start and end of the line with just those two keyboard shortcuts. I told you that it’d be quick and easy!

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article. This one is pretty simple but that’s okay. So long as it’s sharing some knowledge and I managed to get an article out on schedule, it’s all good by me. This time, you’ve learned how to navigate to the start of end of the line – in the terminal and without taking your eyes off the screen.

You might as well memorize the shortcuts as they appear to be pretty universal from my testing. They’ll likely be faster for you than any of the other methods, so they’re worth learning and adding to your growing toolbox of Linux tools. Ideally, my ailments will go away soon… I’m hopeful…

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: Create a New User Without a /home Directory

There are legit reasons to create a new user without a /home directory. Maybe you want a new user to have limited access to just a few things, or a dedicated user that runs a single application. This article will show you how.

See, I was reading a forum post on Linux.org about a member that had set up a bunch of Linux computers for some learning children. One of the things that came up was that the kids were already trying to guess the password so that they could install games.

That got me thinking about some security implications. What if they guessed the password and wanted to hide it? What if they used that password to create a new user, but one without a /home directory so that it wouldn’t be easily spotted by just using a file manager? It wouldn’t be impossible to find, but it’d not stand out immediately with a quick inspection. Besides, the new account’s password would remain the same even if the admin changed the password to the root account.

Well, if they get that advanced and guess that password, I kinda hope they read this article! Why? Because the world needs a little chaos and creativity! So, my fellow Linux.org forum user, this article is for you! Well, no… It’s for when the kids use a search engine to learn how to make a user account a little less obvious!

Create a New User Without /home:

This one will be short and easy, perfect for budding Linux users! There are two easy ways to create a user without automatically making a /home folder.

Both ways are done in the terminal, so you need to open it. To open the default terminal, use your keyboard and press CTRL + ALT + T.

Now, the first method is:

sudo useradd -M <new_username>

1	sudo useradd -M <new_username>

The second method is:

sudo useradd --no-create-home <new_username>

1	sudo useradd --no-create-home <new_username>

Those commands will both make a new user without a /home directory of their own. (Be sure to check ‘man useradd’ for more awesome things you can do.)

There are a couple more steps you can take, if you want. First, there’s no password assigned to the user you just created. So, let’s assign a password to them.

sudo passwd <new_username>

1	sudo passwd <new_username>

Follow the prompts to type in the password twice and you’re done with that step.

Next, the newly created user isn’t a member of sudoers – meaning it has no administrative rights. That’s easily fixed with the following command:

sudo adduser <new_username> sudo

1	sudo adduser <new_username> sudo

That command will make the new user a member of the sudoers group. Meaning they have administrative rights over the system. They can install software, remove software, delete files, create files, or even update the entire system.

The admin can still discover the new user by listing the users or poking around in the logs. However, the user won’t stand out immediately. There won’t be any new user folder in /home, so one may not have any reason to look. Additionally, changing the root password won’t matter. You’ll have to do something about the user they created.

And that, kids, is how you get started hiding stuff after you’ve discovered the root password! Use that account for your nefarious activities! You’re welcome!

Closure:

Nah, there are legit reasons why you’d want a user without a home folder. You may want that user to only access a limited set of applications or whatever. A keen admin would likely notice this fairly rapidly, so it’s not a great long-term strategy for hiding your game installing.