>>I'm trying to determine what truly is the best practice
>>for the location of the root home directory and why or if it really
>>matters

of course it matters, my questions were retorical and you failed to
pick that up .. you actually do have the right idea but how you got to
that conslusion is anyones guess .. if / fills up then the system can
hang .. so having someones home directory as / with super user access
rights to write any thing of any size (ulimits are usually -1 for
root) is plain old suicide .. it may not be a user, but it could be a
script or a typo or an accident .. better to have that accident
somewhere where it will not hang you system.

my 2 cents .. and go read some books ..

HTH
Mark Taylor

Well AIX is a UNIX-like system, but not really UNIX...

In UNIX you place essential binaries into /bin and /sbin,
everything else into /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (and many other places).
This way in emergency you can save/repair your system even without
mounting /usr. On the other hand, in AIX /bin and /sbin are empty,
every binary is located in /usr.

About your question: non-creating a /root directory is simply
pollution of the root directory... or laziness

ankhu.igs@gmail.com wrote:
> I've tried to find something about this in "Best Practices" documents
> but haven't run across anything. In almost all places I have worked
> with AIX, the root home directory has always been "/". Where I am
> working now the standard seems to be to have the root directory in /
> home/root or in some cases /root, but there is great resistance to
> having the root home directory in "/". So I'm sure there are a lot of
> opinions on the subject. What's your? Which do you prefer and why?
> Is there a technical justification for your choice? Is your choice
> best practice or just force of habit?

OK, here is my opinion:

Having root's home directory in / presents some risk because it is much
easier to type 'cd' accidentally than 'cd /'. And once you are in
/ a number of recursive commands can be detrimental (I once ruined a system
with a 'chmod -R').

Having root's home in /home/root is a bad idea because it makes it
difficult to unmount /home, and root is homeless in maintenance mode.

My personal choice is to have /root as root's home directory.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe