File Mounting and Paths

This previous video also spoke about the ~ character, which stands for a user's home directory. For example, a user named Megan might have ~ standing for "/users/megan/home/".

Each user has a unique home directory, and, on Linux, there is a file in the OS called "/etc/passwd" that stores the path to each user's home directory.

A system admin can change the home directory of a user. For example, on Linux, one can do so with a terminal command such as:
usermod --home </newhome/username> <username>
where </newhome/username> is the new home directory that you are trying to set, e.g., "/users/megan/home/Desktop", and <username> is the username of the user whose home directory is changed, such as megan.