home directory location

home_dir

Where a user's home directory is located varies from platform to platform and among the users on a single computer. But the actual location of the home directory is available through special environment variables:
Unix/Linux
$HOME
Windows
%USERPROFILE%
Cygwin
$USERPROFILE

In order to find out where these environment variables actually point to, do the following:
on Unix/Linux, open a terminal and type the following command
echo $HOME
on Windows, open a command-prompt and type the following command
echo %USERPROFILE%
on Cygwin, open a bash and type the following command
echo $USERPROFILE