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The User's Home Directory

A home directory stores applications, resources, and documents specific to a particular user. Home directories generally bear the name of the user&emdash;the name that the user logs in under.

Home directories can be found in either of these locations, based on their type:

/Local/Users	Home directories that are on the local computer.
/Network/Users	Home directories that are mounted from a file server on the network.

(When entering in a file name, users can specify their home directory as ~. For example, ~/Applications refers to the Applications directory that's in the home directory of the current user.)

The standard directories within a user's home directory are:

Applications	Contains applications for a specific user. Applications in /Local/Applications and /System/Applications are shared by multiple users, but those in ~/Applications are generally used only by the owner of the home directory that contains them.
Library	Contains resource files for a specific user. See The /System/Library directory for a description of the contents of Library directories.

Standard directories such as Applications and Library play a role in Mac OS X's search routines, the way that the Workspace Manager finds the proper application to run for a given document, for example. See Search Paths for more information.

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