Take the tour ×  In unix like systems what is the difference
between a home directory and working directory ?  share|improve
this question Your home directory is where you go to rest
between work sessions. Your working directory is where you are
right now. Because unix systems are multitasking, each process
has its own working directory; processes can change directories,
too. –  Gilles Nov 29 '12 at 22:53 add comment  2 Answers  up
vote 2 down vote accepted  A home directory is where you start
when you open a shell. The working directory is where you are
right now. You can usually go directly to the home directory
with the command cd and you can find out what the working
directory is with pwd.  share|improve this answer add comment
The home directory is a directory associated with a user name in
the system's user account database. It's the 6th field in the
entry returned by getent passwd some-user.  When you log in, the
HOME environment variable is initialized from that value and
applications use that variab