The common practice to share file for all users on the same machine?

Question

There is a powerful server with few users on it. Each user has gigabytes of data to process.

Sometimes a user may want to use other's file, and therefore writes output in other's folder.

What's the common practice to do it? I can think of create a /share folder and make it rwx to all. Is this the common practice? Any better location for this folder?

(Kind of feel that create a folder at / (root) for this purpose isn't good :S)

Answer 1

I think you are searching for /usr/local/share/ but it is hard to answer since this depends on what kind of file your are planning to "share" between users.

But if we are talking about office files or something like that maybe you should use use some kind of revision system like subversion or git. And then the users will have a checkout/clone in their homedir.

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Update: A way to make this a little bit better could would be that every user gets it's own subdir in the shared folder. He is allowed to write in his own folder but not the other subfolders. And all users are allowed to read from all the directories. That way you don't have to think about file collisions if two users use the same filename, or deletes the colleges files by mistake.

Btw the idea behind /usr/ is described in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard ( http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-4.1.html )

-"/usr is shareable, read-only data."

So I would probably use a dir in either /home/ or /var/ instead...

Answer 2

For punctual use, the common practice is that each user creates files in their own home directory. ~/pub is a common name of a directory for files all other users are supposed to be able access. If only a subset of users may access certain files, use groups or access control lists to manage permissions.

For more advanced use, when multiple users may work on the same file, use a version control system. There's no really standard place to store the (master) repository; I've seen repositories under ~someuser/$project, /net/repositories/$project, /srv/repositories/$project, /var/www/$project, /home/$project, etc.