Utility: home - go to your home folder

Utility: home - go to your home folder Status: Built 2026-10-13, QEMU-verified (osdev test files). As-built reference. Shape: shell built-in (see 0_conventions.md section 2).

1. Purpose

home moves you to your home folder, /users/default - where a session starts and where a bare name like notes.txt is written (docs/filesystem-layout.md section 6).

gsh> cd /system/services
/system/services
gsh> home
/users/default

2. Invocation

home takes no argument; given one, it says so and does nothing.

3. Why a word, when a bare cd already does it

A bare cd goes home, and still does. But it means different things on different systems - "go home" on Unix, "print where I am" on Windows - so a reader who knows one guesses wrong about the other. home cannot be read two ways, and it is the form help advertises. It is a command, not a folder name: cd home still enters a folder called home, if there is one. In a script, the home folder as a path is $home (docs/scripting.md), so cd $home/notes works where home alone would not.

When users exist (phase 3 of the layout), home is the signed-in user's folder; home goes there unchanged.

4. Behaviour

The same as cd /users/default: the folder is checked with fs and the move is refused loudly if it does not exist - a disk formatted before the layout has no home folder, and drives flash gives it one. An action, not a pipe source (0_conventions.md rule 12).

5. Capabilities

• fs, for the one check that the folder exists, and console output.

6. Conformance

Conforms: home help and home version (with a real example, per 0_conventions.md); listed by the shell's top-level help under Storage.