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Assuming the machine is running a Linux kernel, sessions make use of the Bash shell and everything is using default configurations (no user has made any changes to config files), can we assume that the $HOME environment variable is always set?

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  • nobody doesn't have a home! (It's nobody, the user.) Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 6:18
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    @devnull not having a home (ie. having a home directory specified that doesn't exist), doesn't mean the $HOME env. variable cannot be set. If it is set, it just doesn't have to point to an existing directory nor to the home entry in /etc/passwd Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 6:49

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Yes. The POSIX specification requires the OS to set a value for $HOME:

HOME
The system shall initialize this variable at the time of login to be a pathname of the user's home directory. See pwd.h.

What about user nobody?

# su - nobody
No directory, logging in with HOME=/
$ echo $HOME
/

Even though nobody has no true home, HOME is set to the root directory.

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  • It isn't the shell that sets HOME — none of the common shells does except zsh. It's the program that logs you in (including methods like cron). Commented Apr 10, 2014 at 0:50

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