[TriLUG] A funny thing happened

[Andrew Perrin]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, M. Mueller (bhu5nji) wrote:

> You mean all the .kde,  .drakfw, .younameit files would come back if had 
> logged out and logged back in?  

No, certainly not.

> Or do you mean that I could have logged in as 
> root, deleted my old self and created a new  account for myself and things 
> would've been back to normal (less all that email)?
> 

Yes, something like that. Among the (many) smart things about a unix-ish
OS is that user-space files are specific to users, and non-user-space
files are not (in general). This is in direct contradiction to, say,
Windows, where you might find your document stuck deep in the Profiles
directory.

What that means is that a properly-installed application *cannot* depend
on one user's setup to work for another user. So if you had deleted and
recreated your"self" you would have lost customizations you'd made
(preferences, etc.) but certainly no more so than you did by reinstalling
the entire OS. Fundamentally, the loss of a user's space is a catastrophe
for the user, but not for the computer.

> I'm gonna do the Samba thing and write some crontab entries to tar and cp 
> stuff in my user accounts.

A nice idea.



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA