SSH not landing in the home directory

Question

I have recently installed Raspbian into a Raspberry Pi. As part of the installation process I changed the user name and group from the default (pi) to my own (let's call it user) using usermod and groupmod. I also moved the home directory (/home/pi) to the new user name (/home/user) using usermod. Everything works fine except that when I login using SSH instead of landing the new user directory (/home/user) I end up at the home directory (/home). Any idea why this may be happening? Any solution? It's not a big deal but it is confusing me.

The directory /home/user exists with permissions 755. In addition to that the /etc/passwd file contains an entry that looks like the following:

user:x:1000:1000:User:/home/user:/bin/bash

To me everything looks fine, but still when I login from ssh I get a prompt that looks like user@raspberrypi /home $.

Solution 1

did you use the -m option when you used usermod -d ?

if not, then you need to actually move the home directory as well as change the entry in /etc/passwd.

This will rename /home/pi to /home/user if /home/user does not already exist:

cd /home
[ ! -e user ] && sudo mv pi user

oterwise, check that user's home directory is actually /home/user and not just /home...here are some of the methods you can use to find out a user's home dir:

grep '^user:' /etc/passwd      # works for system-local accounts only

finger user                    # requires finger to be installed

pinky -l user                  # part of GNU coreutils

getent passwd user             # should work no matter where the account
                                 data is stored

Solution 2

I'm having the same problem using Raspbian. After adding a user named "bill", raspbian failed to create the user's home directory. Although I had created the user account using "useradd bill && passwd bill", and although the /etc/passwd file contained the expected path to /home/bill as the home directory, the actual path "/home/bill" was never created. I had to manually create /home/bill as root, and then use chmod and chown to change the permissions and ownership to the right value. Now when I log on as "bill" using ssh, I end up in the "/" directory rather than in /home/bill. The /home/bill/.bashrc file does not do any trickery to change the directory from the default value of /home/bill.

It would appear that raspbian doesn't work the way that every other linux distribution works. This is clearly a BUG.

Comments

[Admin]

You may have better luck with this question at the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange.

[Admin]

@MichaelHampton Raspberry Pi tends to migrate questions purely about software to Unix & Linux, actually. I think this question would be considered off-topic on Raspberry Pi.

[Admin]

What's the content of your ~/.bash_profile, ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc (if they exist)? If you run ssh raspberrypi pwd and ssh raspberrypi 'echo ~', what does it show?

[Admin]

I tried both your commands and both return /home/user (where user is the actual username). The contents of the other files (they do exist) is the default that comes with Raspberry Pi.

[Pere Tuset]

The directory /home/user exists with permissions 755. In addition to that the /etc/passwd file contains an entry that looks like the following: user:x:1000:1000:User:/home/user:/bin/bash. To me everything looks fine, but still when I login from ssh I get a prompt that looks like user@raspberrypi /home $. Any further ideas?

[Alessio]

very odd. have you checked your log file to see if there are any error/warning messages from sshd? try /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog and/or /var/log/auth.log

[Alessio]

also, what happens when you type cd and hit enter (it should take you to your home dir).

[Alessio]

also, i just noticed that you said the prompt says ... /home $. did you check if that's correct? it might just be a problem with your prompt string, $PS1 . run pwd to print the current working directory name.

[Shadur]

Also, what is the ownership of /home/user?

[Kusalananda]

What's chdir? This reads more like a comment than an answer, or possibly like a follow-up question.

[Cuthbert Nibbles]

I thought chdir could be used to (basically) change the path of ~ which would make it a viable work-around, but I was mistaken. I'm going to delete the reply as it is effectively a comment.