What is the purpose of /home on a Mac? On Linux, (which I am used to), /home is the place where home folders live.

On a Mac, home is some kind of crazy mutant:

$ mount
/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)


Other than to be non-conformist, is there some purpose to this auto_home mount point?  Considering how it mucks up things that come right out of the box, there must be some wonderful thing that it accomplishes, but I can't figure out what that would be.....
It predates Linux and was in NeXTStep from 1989.

Linux is not Unix and does not meet the Unix specification.

auto_home is the place where in a networked environment your home directory is mounted via NFS.

Any decently scripted process won't be affected by /home - if it is what else has it got wrong?

The Unix standard way to find your home directory is $HOME environment variable and home directories are not all of the form /home/X, in fact I have worked at places where the home directories have had different paths at their root i.e. some users had home directory /home/X  and others /user/Y