What happened to /home?

[Charlie Kester]

On Wed 23 Dec 2009 at 22:33:20 PST Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>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'.

Are you sure about that?

On my FreeBSD 8 system, I just tried this:

    cd /etc
    ls /home/ckester

and the result was a listing of my home directory, not some directory
under /etc.

Yet the result of ls -ld /home on my system is the same as above.

The symlink named "home" is found in the root directory "/" and the
relative path usr/home is apparently relative to that root directory,
not the current directory.