SSH not landing in the home directory

homelinuxraspberry pisshusers

I have recently installed Raspbian into a Raspberry Pi. As part of the installation process I changed the user name and group from the default (pi) to my own (let's call it user) using usermod and groupmod. I also moved the home directory (/home/pi) to the new user name (/home/user) using usermod. Everything works fine except that when I login using SSH instead of landing the new user directory (/home/user) I end up at the home directory (/home). Any idea why this may be happening? Any solution? It's not a big deal but it is confusing me.

The directory /home/user exists with permissions 755. In addition to that the /etc/passwd file contains an entry that looks like the following:

user:x:1000:1000:User:/home/user:/bin/bash

To me everything looks fine, but still when I login from ssh I get a prompt that looks like user@raspberrypi /home $.

Best Answer

did you use the -m option when you used usermod -d ?

if not, then you need to actually move the home directory as well as change the entry in /etc/passwd.

This will rename /home/pi to /home/user if /home/user does not already exist:

cd /home
[ ! -e user ] && sudo mv pi user

oterwise, check that user's home directory is actually /home/user and not just /home...here are some of the methods you can use to find out a user's home dir:

grep '^user:' /etc/passwd      # works for system-local accounts only

finger user                    # requires finger to be installed

pinky -l user                  # part of GNU coreutils

getent passwd user             # should work no matter where the account
                                 data is stored
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