User Support

Home Directories

Getting Familiar With Your Home Directory

When a new user account is created, a directory is created for the user under /home. This is normally the only place users are allowed to write files.

To view the contents of the home directory:

ls /home

A directory exists for each user on the BSBC cluster. Depending on user/group permissions, one user may be able to view or share another user’s files.

When a user logs on to the BSBC cluster, by default, they will be placed in their home directory. Before going further, make sure you are in your home directory. View the present working directory:

pwd

You should see /home/username. (Where username is your account name.)

If you are not in your home directory, change to your home directory:

cd /home/username

View the files in your home directory:

ls

New users will have two items in their home directory: bin and mpd.hosts. The bin directory contains programs essential for users and mpd.hosts is a symbolic link to a file listing all BSBC nodes and the number of cores on each node.

Exploring a little further – look at all files on your directory:

ls -a

You should see many more files now. The ls -a command allows you to see all of your files, including some user specific configuration files that are normally hidden.

Take note of the .bash_profile and .bashrc files. Users can edit these files to set various parameters such as a default path for their bash shell. The .bash_profile script is executed for login shells, while the .bashrc script is executed for interactive non-login shells. Changes are, if you need to modify one of these files, you will be given explicit instructions. For more information on these files, see bash’s man pages or refer to internet sources.

To customize the colors of your directory listing, copy the /etc/DIR_COLOR file to your home directory with the name ~/.dir_colors and modify it to display the colors you prefer.