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I've a user account in a remote machine. but it doesn't have a home directory in that machine. Is it possible to create a home directory without having root account details. If yes, how it can be done.

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Do you have shell access? What does echo $HOME tell you? What do you get for the next to last field if you do grep yourusername /etc/passwd? – Dennis Williamson Sep 14 '10 at 4:12
$HOME is "/home/joe" and for grep, I got "joe:x:1013:1015::/home/joe:/bin/sh" – Joe Sep 14 '10 at 4:24
Do you have write permission in /home/joe? If yes, you do already have a $HOME directory. – honk Sep 14 '10 at 12:54

1 Answer

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No matter what, you will still need a directory where you can store your stuff (i.e. write permission and it is not being cleaned-up like /tmp).

If you have such a directory setting the environment variable $HOME to that path will already make a lot of programs treat it like a home directory. You can set that variable with

$ export HOME=/some/dir/

You could put above line in a shell script you execute after each login. In that file you should also start your shell in login mode or make it source your .profile files.

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