Your home directory is set to /homes/<username>, but this is not actually a real directory. It’s a symbolic link to a directory on one of the NFS systems, e.g. /u/riker/u97/kkasad.

Starship/prompts

Because of this symlink, we get some weird behavior:

$ cd /homes/kkasad
$ pwd
/u/riker/u97/kkasad

Because the current directory doesn’t start with the value of the HOME variable, my shell prompt shows something like this even when I’m in a directory inside my home directory:

kkasad on 🌐 data in /u/riker/u97/kkasad/cs352
$

This is annoying. I want it to show ~/cs352. To fix this, I added this to my ~/.zshrc:

if [ -L $HOME ]; then # if home is a symbolic link
	export HOME=$(readlink $HOME) # set home to the resolved path
	cd $HOME # cd to the resolved path so pwd matches
fi