Proper way to move user directory to a new home partition

homeusers

If I have an existing user user with an existing home directory /home/user, what is the proper way to move his home directory a new home partition?

Simply copying the directory with cp does not preserve owner and timestamps (unless I use the appropriate cp options). Would cp be enough? And what options should be used to make sure everything is copied correctly?

Best Answer

I use cp -vfa, but the rsync -vaH (mentioned by @Kusalananda in a comment) would also work. In the case of latter, don't forget that all directories should end with / (i.e. /home/gradient will be not okay, /home/gradient/ yes).

Once in a life we all should really read the ls, cp, rm, bash and rsync manual pages, they can really a lot.

If the target directory is on the same partition, a simple mv -vf would be also ok.

Don't forget to update the home directory entry belonging to the user in /etc/passwd.

Related Solutions

Users – How to Rename a Unix User Account

Try

usermod --move-home --login <new-login-name> --home <new-home-dir> <old-login-name>

The --move-home option moves the old home directory's contents to the new one given by the --home option which is created if it doesn't already exist.

If you want the primary user group to match the new-login-name, add --gid <new-login-name> to the command above, but the group must be pre-existing.

See the man page for more info:

man usermod

Approaches to prevent user from deleting home folder

To remove a directory, you need write permission over its parent. Which means that as long as user can't write to /home, he won't be able to remove his own directory.

$ chown root:root /home
$ chmod 0755 /home

$ chown user:user /home/user
$ chmod 0750 /home/user

With these permissions, root is the only user who can manipulate directories immediately under /home. This setup is actually very common on Linux systems, since they are multiuser ; however, I have seen Ubuntu setups in which /home belonged to the first user (usually ID 1000). While Ubuntu's first user usually is a sudoer (meaning he could delete everything using sudo), I don't think it is a good practise to give /home to anyone but root.

When it comes to chattr, I believe this would be overkill. You are facing a permissions problem, there is no need for other file attributes.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Users – How to Rename a Unix User Account

Approaches to prevent user from deleting home folder

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