How can I get the current user s username in Bash

Question

I am writing a program in Bash that needs to get the user s username   I have heard of a thing called whoami  but I have no idea what it does or how to use it   What command do I use to get the current username

User · Answer

The current user s username can be gotten in pure Bash with the   parameter operator  parameter expansion  introduced in Bash 4 4          u   printf   s n       P     The   built-in  synonym of true  is used instead of a temporary variable by setting the last argument  which is stored in     We then expand it   u  as if it were a prompt string with the P operator   This is better than using  USER  as  USER is just a regular environmental variable  it can be modified  unset  etc  Even if it isn t intentionally tampered with  a common case where it s still incorrect is when the user is switched without starting a login shell  su s default

User · Answer

Two commands    id  prints the user id along with the groups  Format  uid usernumber username      whoami gives the current user name

User · Answer

A hack the I ve used on Solaris 9 and Linux and which works fine for both of them   ps -o user  -p      awk   print  1     This snippet prints the name of the user with the current EUID   NOTE  you need Bash as the interpreter here   On Solaris you have problems with methods  described above    id does not accept the -u and -n parameters  so you will have to parse the output  whoami does not exist  by default  who am I prints owner of current terminal  ignores EUID   USER variable is set correctly only after reading profile files  for example   etc profile

User · Answer

When the following is invoked within a shell script  the terminal prompt will appear just like many other unix commands do when they are run with sudo    get superuser password user   whoami  stty -echo read -p  quot  sudo  password for  user   quot  password stty echo echo  quot  quot   Then you can use  password as needed

User · Answer

On most Linux systems  simply typing whoami on the command line provides the user ID   However  on Solaris  you may have to determine the user ID  by determining the UID of the user logged-in through the command below   echo  UID   Once the UID is known  find the user by matching the UID against the  etc passwd file   cat  etc passwd   cut -d    -f1 3

User · Answer

In Solaris OS I used this command     who am i       Remember to use it with space    On Linux- Someone already answered this in comments     whoami         Without space

User · Answer

An alternative to whoami is id -u -n   id -u will return the user id  e g  0 for root

User · Answer

All  From what I m seeing here all answers are wrong  especially if you entered the sudo mode  with all returning  root  instead of the logged in user   The answer is in using  who  and finding eh  tty1  user and extracting that  Thw  quot w quot  command works the same and var  SUDO USER gets the real logged in user  Cheers  TBNK

User · Answer

Get the current task s user struct   define get current user                                                                struct user struct    u                   const struct cred    cred                   cred   current cred                       u   get uid   cred- gt user                  u

User · Answer

For Bash  KornShell  ksh   sh  etc  Many of your questions are quickly answered by either   man  function    to get the documentation for the system you are using or usually more conveniently   google  man function   This may give different results for some things where Linux and Unix have modest differences   For this question  just enter  whoami  in your shell   To script it   myvar   whoami

User · Answer

On the command line  enter  whoami   or  echo   USER    To save these values to a variable  do  myvariable   whoami    or  myvariable  USER   Of course  you don t need to make a variable since that is what the  USER variable is for

User · Answer

Use the standard Unix Linux BSD MacOS command logname to retrieve the logged in user  This ignores the environment as well as sudo  as these are unreliable reporters  It will always print the logged in user s name and then exit  This command has been around since about 1981   My-Mac   devin  logname devin My-Mac   devin  sudo logname Password  devin My-Mac   devin  sudo su - My-Mac   root  logname devin My-Mac   root  echo  USER root

User · Answer

When root  sudo  permissions are required  which is usually 90   when using scripts  the methods in previous answers always give you root as the answer   To get the current  logged in  user is just as simple  but it requires accessing different variables   SUDO UID and  SUDO USER   They can be echoed   echo  SUDO UID echo  SUDO USER   Or assigned  for example   myuid  SUDO UID myuname  SUDO USER

[bash] How can I get the current user's username in Bash?

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