Apple - Where do I find my user folder in the OS X folder hierarchy?

You can find the location to your home directory by looking in the "Users & Groups" System Preference pane.

1. Open "System Preferences" application
2. Click "Users & Groups"
3. Click the padlock to unlock it, if it is not already unlocked. Enter user name and password for an Admin user.
4. Right click on the User name you want to find the home directory for, select "Advanced Options..."
5. Observe the path as noted next to "Home directory:"

Now, once you see where OS X thinks your home folder is located then you can work on un hiding it if it is not showing up where it is suppose to be.

Make sure its name does not start with ".", Additionally you can use the SetFile -a v /pathToHome command to make it visible if it appears to be hidden for no apparent reason.

To find where it is, open Terminal and type pwd for "Print Working Directory". This works because the Terminal opens in your home folder by default.

You can move to your home folder in terminal by typing one of cd (defaults to your home folder), cd $HOME (moves to the location in that environment variable), or cd ~ (a shortcut for home), or cd /Users/johnsmith/ (the absolute path).

OS X is Unix-based so there is only one big filesystem visible to the user, even if it is distributed across several partions. This also applies to external drives which are accessible under /Volumes/NAME-OF-DRIVE.

The individual user home folders (which contain all the nice stuff like Downloads, Documents etc.) are available in /Users, each user has his/her own directory there with a name matching their short name. Type ls -l /Users in Terminal to see all of them.

And to actually "go" there, enter cd ~johnsmith (for user johnsmith) or just cd (for your own home folder), followed by ls -l to see the content.