There are times when your home directory might not be available. This can be due to your homedir coming from LDAP or another network service and the local directory not being available. When logging in you’ll see something similar to

Last login: Mon Sep 13 21:03:37 from foo.example.com Could no chdir to home
directory /home/example/user
[user@bar /]$

There are several ways to work around this. Creating /home/example/user is one, but you might not want this to be permanent.

export HOME=`mktemp -d` 
cd $HOME

Will create a temporary directory and make that $HOME. This doesn’t resolve all issues with a missing home directory, but it’s a start.

Reference

man mktemp