What happened to /home?

[Erik Trulsson]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 08:33:20AM +0200, 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'.

Wrong. Relative paths in symlinks start at the symlink is in, not the
current directory. I.e. that the symlink is relative should not be a
problem.  (Under AmigaOS relative symlinks worked as you describe, which
made them a PITA and fairly useless, but under Unix relative symlinks have a
more sane behaviour.)



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se