4 ms·

It took me a shockingly long amount of time before I realized it was silly to have a username on my machines. I am the only person using this, why am I typing u

It took me a shockingly long amount of time before I realized it was silly to have a username on my machines. I am the only person using this, why am I typing unnecessary cruft? Username switched to “root” on all my machines and I remove the username from PS1. /root is shorter than /home/a (:

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
That requires faith in software not making hard coded assumptions about filesystem structure. Something which I am not prepared to do. How much software still cannot respect XDG?
- holowoodman 2y ago
  Not a problem in practice. I've seen a lot of systems having user homes in places other than /home for various (usually historical) reasons. Never broke anything afaik.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    It probably is fine. Still makes my spider sense tingle about some unforeseen failure that will crop up one day.
    - tredre3 2y ago
      I've seen scripts with hardcoded "/home/$username" so your worries aren't entirely unfounded. It's understandable too, because Linux doesn't provide a nice way to retrieve that information. You'll have to parse /etc/passwd (which might not contain all users) or hope that whatever language you're using supports path extrapolations so that you can do realpath(~username) or call a third party tool that does, like a shell.
      - holowoodman 2y ago
        Of course there is a nice way. 'getent passwd' if you have a shell script, or the getpwent() libc function if you are in some real programming language somewhere. That is ages-old POSIX stuff from almost the last century even (POSIX.1-2001, actually older than the standard even, since it has been in SystemV and BSD...), and Linux has always supported that.
      - anthk 2y ago
        $HOME.
- jesprenj 2y ago
  ln -s /root /home/root
quotemstr 2y ago
Just change your home directory to /me. Who cares about /home? As for permissions: on a single human machine, sudo is useful principally to introduce friction to random install scripts doing random things to my system. In day to day use, there's no reason for me to input my password just to install some Firefox snap or something.
saulpw 2y ago
Once I had this thought and renamed the root user to my own name. Hilarity ensued.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

That requires faith in software not making hard coded assumptions about filesystem structure. Something which I am not prepared to do. How much software still cannot respect XDG?

holowoodman 2y ago
Not a problem in practice. I've seen a lot of systems having user homes in places other than /home for various (usually historical) reasons. Never broke anything afaik.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  It probably is fine. Still makes my spider sense tingle about some unforeseen failure that will crop up one day.
  - tredre3 2y ago
    I've seen scripts with hardcoded "/home/$username" so your worries aren't entirely unfounded. It's understandable too, because Linux doesn't provide a nice way to retrieve that information. You'll have to parse /etc/passwd (which might not contain all users) or hope that whatever language you're using supports path extrapolations so that you can do realpath(~username) or call a third party tool that does, like a shell.
    - holowoodman 2y ago
      Of course there is a nice way. 'getent passwd' if you have a shell script, or the getpwent() libc function if you are in some real programming language somewhere. That is ages-old POSIX stuff from almost the last century even (POSIX.1-2001, actually older than the standard even, since it has been in SystemV and BSD...), and Linux has always supported that.
    - anthk 2y ago
      $HOME.
jesprenj 2y ago
ln -s /root /home/root

quotemstr 2y ago

Just change your home directory to /me. Who cares about /home? As for permissions: on a single human machine, sudo is useful principally to introduce friction to random install scripts doing random things to my system. In day to day use, there's no reason for me to input my password just to install some Firefox snap or something.

saulpw 2y ago

Once I had this thought and renamed the root user to my own name. Hilarity ensued.