confusion of space allocation /home and /HOME

Question

I recently got a new W8 computer and followed this tutorial to get Ubuntu installed in dual boot. This is what my file system looks like:

Device        Directory      Total
/dev/sda6     /               45GBiB
/dev/sda2     /boot/efi       356MiB
/dev/sda7     /HOME           874.3GiB

Now, I was going about my data science stuff and downloaded a 12GB file, and un-zipped it. I start getting errors saying that I do not have enough memory. I know I have ~1TB allocated to Linux. All I can tell is that I was working in /Home/myusername assuming that that's where most of my space was allocated, but it seems as though ~800GB are in /HOME. Since I'm new to Linux I'm a little confused. Any ideas on how to go about this? Should I just start using /HOME or is there a proper way to reallocate space?

terdon · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-31T18:10:08.453

1

The default Linux file system is case sensitive. You have defined a mountpoint at /HOME when instead, you should have used /home. Therefore, the /HOME is simply not used, it is not your actual home directory, that is in /home/username which is completely separate from /HOME.

To fix this and use the 874G partition you have created as your actual home directory (in the Linux world, your home dir is referred to as $HOME (note the $) or ~/), you will need to follow these steps:

Create your home directory on /HOME:

sudo mkdir "/HOME/$USER"
sudo chown username "/HOME/$USER"

Copy everything from your current $HOME to this new directory.
```
mv ~/* ~/.* "/HOME/$USER"
```
Tell the system to mount the partition of /HOME in the right place, /home. For this, you will need to edit /etc/fstab:
```
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
```
That will bring up an editor window, you need to find the line that mounts /HOME, it will look something like this:
```
UUID=123-ABC    /HOME   ext4    rw,errors=remount-ro    0   0
```
Change /HOME to /home, leave everything else as it is.
Remove your home dir and reboot
```
sudo rmdir "/home/$USER"
sudo reboot
```

edited Mar 31 '14 at 18:10

answered Mar 31 '14 at 17:50

terdon

100,812

please user $USER instead of username ;-) the system will tranform it to the current user and commands then actually work. – Rinzwind Mar 31 '14 at 17:59
And that copy command will not work either, use find or rsync – Panther Mar 31 '14 at 18:07
@bodhi.zazen why not? Changed to mv to simplify but the cp would get everything. Note that I'm using -r and also specifying ~/.*. – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 18:08
I get a rmdir: failed to remove `/home/$USER': Directory not empty. What should I do? – user263961 Mar 31 '14 at 18:09
@user263961 means you did not move the contents over. If you are sure about removing it add a -r (for recursive delete) – Rinzwind Mar 31 '14 at 18:10
@user263961 see updated answer, I changed the 2nd step, try that instead. – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 18:10
@terdon is misses files , see http://askubuntu.com/questions/259383/how-can-i-get-mv-or-the-wildcard-to-move-hidden-files – Panther Mar 31 '14 at 18:16
I would not delete the old home directory until you make sure everything has been copied. – Panther Mar 31 '14 at 18:17
@bodhi.zazen as I said, I am using ~/.* for exactly that reason. The post you linked to was using * alone which does not expand to dotfiles but ~/.* does. cp ~/* ~/.* target/ will copy everything including hidden files. – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 18:18
With the new stp 2. I now start getting a series of mv: cannot remove `/home/.../file.csv': Permission denied – user263961 Mar 31 '14 at 18:22
@user263961 that's strange, what is the exact command you are running? You should be the owner of all files in your $HOME. Anyway, try sudo mv ~/* ~/.* "/HOME/$USER" instead. Also note, that this command moves the files. That means it will 1) copy and 2) remove the original. The errors you are getting are only about 2), the copy should have worked regardless. – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 18:24
@bodhi.zazen in fact, even the post you linked to mentions this. Could you please delete your comments since they are misleading? – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 18:26
Ok, this went through and all seems to work just great. Thanks! – user263961 Mar 31 '14 at 18:33
2

I am a bit old-schooled, but I prefer (as root) tar cf - . | (cd /dest/dir; tar xvpf -) for massive copies. It will maintain (possible) different-owned files, mod times, and do the correct thing even for special files. Probably overkill in this case, but... – Rmano Mar 31 '14 at 19:18
1

@Rmano yes, that is better (+1) but given that this is a new install and an inexperienced user, I tried to keep things simple. – terdon Mar 31 '14 at 19:21
The mv command is likely to cause problems if run as the user whose directory you're moving; it's like trying to move the foundation of a house. This would be fine if you create another account and, within it, issue the mv command using sudo, though. On many distributions I'd use root for this purpose, but Ubuntu makes it impossible to log into the root account by default. You either need to activate root as a login account (thus violating the Ubuntu security model) or use a third account for this purpose. – Rod Smith Apr 01 '14 at 00:25

confusion of space allocation /home and /HOME

1 Answers1