

Why is my homedir wide open? - read

Why does the default mode of adduser is to create a home directory that is wide open for anyone to change into?<p>I'm curious how that decision was made.
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lmm
Unix started out at universities. Most students and teachers would have things
they wanted to share with each other, and the filesystem was the most
efficient way of doing so (remember this was well before the web, before even
finger). So most users would have at least some public files, and since you
only have one home dir this meant the home dir had to be public (it wouldn't
make sense to put a public dir inside a private one - rather, you'd have a (or
several) private subdirs for anything you wanted to keep private).

As for why it's still like that, it's just never been worth the cost of
changing it. Since we now have forty years' worth of shell scripts etc. built
on those semantics it would be pretty much impossible to change the default
now. On a modern graphical linux most users aside from old unix diehards will
use the system's UI with its own interface, so it's unlikely to cause problems
for many people.

(To answer your literal question about "how the decision was made", most
likely Kerrigan or Ritchie thought about it for a couple of seconds and then
coded it that way. That's how most of unix's "design decisions" happened)

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ericedge
If you create a file in your home directory that you give permission to anyone
to read or write to, having a+x on your home directory will actually allow
them to read/write the file if they know the full path to it.

This behavior is useful on subdirs, too; for example, a shell account I used
in the past had <http://server.example.com/~username/> mapped to
/home/username/public_html, and since the webserver ran under a user that
didn't have root permissions, making /home/username a+x allowed the webserver
user to access the files that I wanted to share over the web (assuming I had
public_html chmodded properly, of course).

So it's less about cd and more about direct file and/or directory access for
purposes of widely-accessible files.

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noselasd
This isn't the case on any of my machines. What kind of system are you on ?

