Special unix directories (~)

Question

My university has a system set up where each class has its own directory for the professors to publish and receive files. These directories reside under a directory in /home which happens to be a mounted disk and are accessible anywhere in the system by referencing ~csXXX where csXXX is a sub-directory within that home directory.

How are they doing this and how can I do it on my own systems?

Answer 1

There's nothing special about what they're doing, it's just standard shell behavior. (I'm not sure that all shells do this, but at least most of the common ones do, e.g. bash) ~ expands to the home directory of the current user, and ~username expands to the home directory of the named user. So it appears that all they've done is set up one user account for each class.

When I was an undergrad the CS department used the same system. I'm sure it's fairly common.

Answer 2

~ is usually an alias for a user's home directory. In this case, perhaps users of a class share a home directory?

You can see this by typing echo ~ and it should spit out a full path and you can see a user's home directory with finger.