In Unix systems, this includes configuration files (usually hidden, we.e. starting using the .), documents, locally installed software, etc. A front yard directory is defined when a share of the user's account information (e.g. in the /etc/passwd file). In numbers of systems—including virtually all distributions of Linux and variants of BSD (e.g. OpenBSD)—a home directory for every user will require the form /home/username (where username is the title of the user account). A residence directory of the superuser account (usually known as root) is traditionally /, but in numbers of freshly systems these are typically placed at /root.

This convention is non universal, but: inside NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and Mac OS X, users' home directories come stored inside /Users/username. Nevertheless witharound NeXTSTEP & OPENSTEP in one user, non-networked setup, there is a restricted pine tree state account tandem using a standard unrestricted root account, which places its users' files inside /me. Around Solaris, home directories come located in /home, however this is actually a mount point of the automounter, which mounts home directories every bit required from either the file server, or even /export/home on the local patterns. Older Unix systems typically utilized paths like /u01 or even /var/users.

Even more, an extra Unix naming convention (originating from either a csh shell) is that ~user can be utilized when stenography for on to the house directory belonging to user, whatever its location on the filesystem. This is how come numbers of web servers are configured to show a user's private website when a URL such as http://www.catb.org/~esr/ is accessed (in this case, a username is esr). The farther stenography allows the user to refer to their have at home directory just when ~.

Separating user information from either rules-wide information avoids redundancy & makes backups of crucial files comparatively elementary. Moreover, Trojan horses, viruses and worms running under a user's title & using their privileges may around virtually all lawsuits exclusively become respire to vary a files in the user's house directory, & mayhap a few files belonging to workgroups a user occurs as a portion of, but not actual patterns files.

Around freshly versions of Microsoft Windows, based on a multi-user Windows NT, each user has the page directory which by default is placed at C:\Documents & Settings\username. (Sustaining username over again replaced per particular user's login title).