Home Sweet Home

When you first log in, you'll be placed in a part of the system that is your personal domain, called the home directory. You are free to do with this area what you will: in particular you can create and delete files and other directories. In general, you cannot create files elsewhere in the system.

Your home directory lives somewhere way down deep in the bowels of the system. On cerebus, it is a directory with the same name as your login name, located in /home. The full directory path is therefore /home/username. Since this is a pain to write, the shell allows you to abbreviate it as ~username (where "username" is your user name), or simply as ~. The weird character (technically called the "twiddle") is usually hidden at the upper left corner of your keyboard.

To see what is in your home directory, issue the command ls -F:

(~) % ls -F
INBOX         Mail/         News/         nsmail/       public_html/

This shows one file "INBOX" and four directories ("Mail", "News") and so on. (The "-F" in the command turns on fancy mode, which appends special characters to directory listings to tell you more about what you're seeing. "/" means directory.)

In addition to the files and directories shown with ls -F, there may be one or more hidden files. These are files and directories whose names start with a "." (technically called the "dot" character). To see these hidden files, add an "a" to the options sent to the ls command:

(~) % ls -aF
./                .cshrc            .login            Mail/
../               .fetchhost        .netscape/        News/
.Xauthority       .fvwmrc           .xinitrc*         nsmail/
.Xdefaults        .history          .xsession@        public_html/
.bash_profile     .less             .xsession-errors
.bashrc           .lessrc           INBOX

Whoa! There's a lot of hidden stuff there. But don't go deleting dot files willy-nilly. Many of them are esential configuration files for commands and other programs. For example, the .cshrc file contains configuration information for the tcsh shell. You can peek into it and see all of tcsh's many options. You can edit it (when you know what you're doing) in order to change things like the command prompt and command search path.

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