Your Home Directory

Linux automatically places users in their home-directory when they login to a node. By default, Linux will create your home-directory under the /home/ directory, named flight (/home/flight). However, on some systems the home directory location may differ.

The Linux command line will accept the ~ (tilde) symbol as a substitute for the currently logged-in user's home-directory. The environment variable $HOME is also set to this value by default. Hence, the following three commands are all equivalent when logged in as the user flight:

  • ls /home/flight
  • ls ~
  • ls $HOME

The root user in Linux has special meaning as a privileged user, and usually does not have a shared home-directory across a research environment. The root account on all nodes is likely to have a home-directory in /root, which is separate for every node. For security reasons, users are not permitted to login to a node as the root user directly - please login as a standard user and use the sudo command to get privileged access.