Ubuntu – Difference between /Home and /home

filesystem

Total Ubuntu/Linux in general noob here.

What is the difference between /home and /Home ? I've noticed I need to use sudo to do anything in /home. /Home (home folder?) has pictures, videos, etc. in it so thats where I want to really create new folders and stuff but I can't seem to get to it using cd.

Best Answer

With /Home you are probably referring to what in Nautilus is signified with 'Home'. The name of this folder actually is not "Home". This folder is named /home/ in the filesystem. /home is the folder which contains all the users Home-folders. (Which explains why you need sudo to do anything there.) /home/username is the personal folder of that user.

So, you can type cd /home/ and press tab to see which options you have (or if you're the only user it will autocomplete your username). ls /home will list all the files and folders in /home. If you have anything there, I would highly recommend moving it to your personal folder, since that's much cleaner.

Faster ways you can cd back to it, are cd (without arguments) or cd ~ (with a possible path behind it, like ~/Pictures )

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Often configurations are done that allow every user to have a public folder in their home directory. This way every user has control over their public files and no system files will ever be accessible there.

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To flesh out the answer a bit, you may want to look at chown's man file before you do anything, but to change the owner of all files in /home/user, you'd do:

chown -hvR user /home/user

where "user" is the name of the owner you want to change it to.

Best Answer

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