/home dir for user data only in 6.10

[MrEinstein]

Hello
I want to separate the .xxxxx files and directories from the directory that the user see as his /home directory.

The goal is that an inexperienced user should not have to see all these .xxxxxx directories and eventually delete/rename one when using the system regardless witch program he uses or if he have enabled showing hidden files by mistake.

Regards
8)

[askrieger]

Re: /home dir for user data only in 6.10

I'm not sure that you can set up user home directories that do not include all of the dotted directories that normally exist for each user. Nor am I sure that you really want to. The reason is that those directories are used by all the programs that have dotted directory trees under /home/<username> for individual configuration options. When your users click on the "settings" or "configure" options in any program, the customizations that they make are written into files in the dotted directory trees. I suspect that configurable programs would do strange things if they couldn't write into those directories.

That said, the newuser addition process is controlled by a Perl script called /usr/sbin/adduser. If I wanted do what you seem to want to do, I would look at the adduser script to make changes. The two strategies I can think of would be (1) change the ownership of the dotted directories to root and then change their permissions to writable by owner only, or (2) change the user's home directory to a directory one level below her real home directory, so that the dotted directories don't appear even if the user has show hidden files activated. Strategy (1) might cause security difficulties because you'd have to find a way (using SUID, or something) to make neccesary configuration changes, and I have no idea how to implement strategy (2).