How do I get the name of the active user via the command line in OS X

Question

User · Answer

There are two ways-  whoami   or   echo  USER

User · Answer

If you want to know who s currently logged in to the system      w  15 56 14 up 5 days  20 58   6 users   load average  0 43  0 53  0 50 USER     TTY        LOGIN    IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT me       pts 2     Fri19    1 03m  0 98s  0 98s - bin bash me       pts 3     09 55    6 00m  0 43s  0 43s  bin bash me       pts 5     15 56    0 00s  0 23s  0 00s w    This is from a Linux system  the formatting on OS X may be slightly different  but the information should be about the same    There may be multiple login sessions  UNIX is designed to be a multi-user system  after all

User · Answer

I m pretty sure the terminal in OS X is just like unix  so the command would be   whoami   I don t have a mac on me at the moment so someone correct me if I m wrong   NOTE - The whoami utility has been obsoleted  and is equivalent to id -un  It will give you the current user

User · Answer

Via here  Checking the owner of  dev console seems to work well   stat -f   Su   dev console

User · Answer

as  whoami  has been obsoleted  it s probably more forward compatible to use   id -un

User · Answer

whoami  EDIT  The whoami utility has been obsoleted by the id 1  utility  and is equivalent to id -un   The command id -p is suggested for normal interactive use

User · Answer

You can also retrieve it from the environment variables  but that is probably not secure  so I would go with Andrew s answer   printenv USER  If you need to retrieve it from an app  like Node  it s easier to get it from the environment variables  such as  process env USER

User · Answer

The question has not been completely answered  IMHO   I will try to explain  I have a crontab entry that schedules a bash shell command procedure  that in turn does some cleanup of my files  and  when done  sends a notification to me using the OS X notification center  with the command osascript -e  display notification        If someone  e g  my wife or my daughter  switches the current user of the computer to her  leaving me in the background  the cron script fails when sending the notification   So  Who is the current user means Has some other people become the effective user leaving me in the background   Do stat -f   Su   dev console returns the current active user name   The answer is yes  so  now my crontab shell script has been modified in the following way       if       usr bin stat -f    Su    dev console      loreti    then  usr bin osascript -e      display notification  Cleanup done  sound name  sosumi  with title  myCleanup   fi

User · Answer

If you d like to display the full name  instead of the username   add the -F flag     id -F Andrew Havens

User · Answer

You can also use the logname command from the BSD General Commands Manual under Linux or MacOS to see the username of the user currently logged in  even if the user is performing a sudo operation  This is useful  for instance  when modifying a user s crontab while installing a system-wide package with sudo  crontab -u   logname   Per man logname   LOGNAME 1   NAME     logname -- display user s login name

User · Answer

getting username in MAC terminal is easy     I generally use whoami in terminal     For example  in this case  I needed that to install Tomcat Server

User · Answer

Define  active user    If the question is  who is the logged in user   then  who am i  or  whoami  is fine  though they give different answers -  whoami  reports just a user name   who am i  reports on terminal and login time too    If the question is  which user ID is the effective ID for the shell   then it is often better to use  id    This reports on the real and effective user ID and group ID  and on the supplementary group IDs too   This might matter if the shell is running SUID or SGID

[macos] How do I get the name of the active user via the command line in OS X?

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