/home mystery

When I was running Tiger, I created a /home directory, and put some important symbolic links in it. When I upgraded to Leopard, my links had disappeared, and I could no longer write to the apparently empty /home. Its permissions had become:

dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel

So I added write permissions to make it drwxdrwxdrwx. But for some reason, I still couldn't write to it.

I tried becoming root with su before writing to it. I tried sudoing as I wrote to it (after adding myself to the wheel group). No matter what I tried, I still couldn't write to it. Whenever I try to create a file or symbolic link in /home, I get an "Input/output error". Curiously, when I reboot, it reverts to its old permissions (dr-xr-xr-x). But even after I change the permissions so I should be able to write to it, I can't. If I delete the directory (via Target Disk Mode), it's automatically regenerated the next time I reboot, and it's still untouchable.

Can anyone help me figure out how to write to this friggin' directory?

I know the directory/folder does not exist on my system which has tiger installed.

What I am wondering is has it been created or is it part of the leopard install. Since it is created after you delete it and reboot. You will need a person woth leopard installed to check and see if the /home directory/folder does exist.

I think this is a Leopard issue. I looked at another Leopard computer, and it had an untouchable empty "/home" directory as well. Tiger and Panther computers don't seem to have one. Now if I could only figure out how Leopard is locking down this directory, which it isn't even using.

FYI, I got a good answer on the darwin-userlevel mailing list:


Leopard's automounter uses the path /home for the autofs filesystem. This is where NFS and other network filesystems are mounted. Your original contents are there, but obscured by the mountpoint:

$ df | grep /home
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

See the automount(8) man page for more information about the automounter.