[8] Different people prefer to place user accounts in a variety of places.
This section describes only a suggested placement for user home
directories; nevertheless we recommend that all FHS-compliant
distributions use this as the default location for home directories.
On small systems, each user's directory is typically one of the many
subdirectories of /home such as /home/smith,
/home/torvalds, /home/operator, etc.
On large systems (especially when the /home directories are
shared amongst many hosts using NFS) it is useful to subdivide user home
directories. Subdivision may be accomplished by using subdirectories
such as /home/staff, /home/guests,
/home/students, etc.
The setup will differ from host to host.
Therefore, no program should rely on this location.[footnote 9]
[9] If you want to find out a user's home directory, you should use the getpwent(3) library function rather than relying on /etc/passwd because user information may be stored remotely using systems such as NIS.