Stupid question about FreeBSD

[giga]

What for there are .cshrc and .profile files in a root "/" folder?

[anomie]

Someone with a little more context/history may have a better explanation, but here's my guess.

First, notice that /.cshrc is hardlinked to /root/.cshrc.

> ls -i /root/.cshrc /.cshrc
9 /.cshrc	9 /root/.cshrc

Now, imagine booting the system to single-user mode, where no filesystems other than / are mounted. I'd imagine (but I have not tested this) that /.cshrc will be executed (assuming csh is used as root's shell), so any nice customizations you've made in /root/.cshrc will still be there in single-user mode.

Other explanations will follow I'm sure.

[peenworm]

/root is in the / filesystem, and the .cshrc will execute from whatever is the user's homedir in the passwd db (/root), so I don't see much benefit from having a copy of .cshrc in /

[BSDfan666]

As said by anomie, the files are used in single user mode... you have all the powers of root, but you're not exactly that user.. meaning, / is effectively your home directory.

[arch]

just to share a little bit of my experience - when added user with pw and forgot to specify home dir after login the user home dir is /