If I have /home on a separate partition, how can I move it back to the root partition?

Some Linux users prefer to have /home mounted on a separate partition from the filesystem root, while others prefer a unified partition. I can find plenty of tutorials out there for moving /home onto a new partition, starting with a unified one. But what if I wanted to go backwards?

Say for example that I initially installed Linux with a small / partition and a larger /home partition, expecting that I'd want to be able to store large files in my home directories while keeping the system isolated (perhaps even with the plan of using additional small partitions for distro-hopping). But then later I moved my large files to a separate drive, and realized that various config files in /home aren't compatible across the distros I want to try. So now the partitioning is just an impediment, and I'd be better off with the now-small home directories physically on the root partition. How could I do that? Obviously if I just unmount the home partition I'll lose access to those files - they won't be magically copied back. And as it stands I can't use tools like cp to copy them back, because that just uses file system paths, and the file system abstracts over those partitions - I can't copy from "the root of the /home partition" to "the home directory on the / partition", because both of those are "/home".

posted 8 days ago

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Karl Knechtel‭

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