What happened to /home?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:40:13 -0800, Rem P Roberti <remegius at comcast.net> wrote:
>On 2009.12.24 00:21:47 +0000, Pieter de Goeje wrote:
>>On Thursday 24 December 2009 00:01:11 Rem P Roberti wrote:
>>> Today I booted my laptop and discovered that /home was gone.
>>> Well...not exactly..but for all intents and purposes.  The system
>>> isn't seeing it although I can see it when I cd to /.  But if I try
>>> and cd to /home from there the system tells me "home:Not a
>>> directory."  What happened, and what can I do about it?
>>
>> Usually /home is a symlink to /usr/home. Perhaps the symlink is
>> busted? What it the output of `ls -ld /home' ? If you can still login
>> as a regular user, what does `pwd -P' say just after you are logged
>> in?
>
> I can still login as regular user, and when I run 'pwd -P' the output is
> / and then it goes back to the prompt.  Output of 'ls -ld /home is:
>
> lrwxr-xr-x  1 root wheel 8 Dec 18 12:08 /home -> usr/home

That's your problem right there.  /home does not point to the absolute
path of '/usr/home' but to a *relative* path starting at whatever
happens to be your current directory when you access '/home'.

Try replacing your current /home symlink with a link to /usr/home
instead:

    # cd /
    # rm -f home
    # ln -s /usr/home home

Then the symlink should start working in a more useful manner.