Linux CentOS – Restrict Users to Their Home Directory

This might sound like a silly idea, but if the users aren't actually doing anything, you could do:

cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : >/tmp/users.list

Then edit /tmp/users.list to only contain the users you want. Then do:

for i in `cat /tmp/users.list`
do
    userdel $i
    useradd -m $i
done

However, many Redhat based distributions will create you a new home directory when you first login, providing it is specified in /etc/passwd where the directory should be.

To test that, do an "su - " and see if it does "the right thing". If it doesn't, the above script will work quite nicely, I think.

Well, obviously symlinks aren't going to work and to the best of my knowledge you can't have two completely seperate chroot environments available at the same time. So... if you want to chroot them to their home folders plus the foos group folder then just have all users dropped (chrooted) into /home.

Then mount /srv/foos to /home/foos instead. Make sure each users own homedir has proper permissions so that only that user has access to it. In this setup each user will be able to access the foos group folder and their own home folder. They could see that other users home dirs exist, but will be unable to access them.

Perhaps someone else has a better idea?