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What is the /opt directory?
(lemmy.zip)
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I was wondering about that too... According to the spec:
Sometimes home directories are in other locations. My University used to have different mount points for different graduating classes on our Unix servers. And I use "/home2" for one of my servers for... reasons.
Though I'm not sure that qualifies as "deprecated"? I get the "non-standard" bit though.
You also have to consider that roots homedir is in /root and not home, so if you'd just assume it's /home/$USER you'd get in trouble when your programm is run or compiled as root.
How about $HOME, is it standardized?
$HOME is a shell variable, created by the shell as it starts, reading from the /etc/passwd file. It's a string, not a symlink or anything.
I mean about the 'should query for it' part.
For the currently logged-in user it's fine, yes. It should always be set.