Is there a portable way to get the current username in Python

Question

Is there a portable way to get the current user s username in Python  i e   one that works under both Linux and Windows  at least    It would work like os getuid    gt  gt  gt  os getuid   42  gt  gt  gt  os getusername    slartibartfast    I googled around and was surprised not to find a definitive answer  although perhaps I was just googling poorly    The pwd module provides a relatively easy way to achieve this under  say  Linux  but it is not present on Windows   Some of the search results suggested that getting the username under Windows can be complicated in certain circumstances  e g   running as a Windows service   although I haven t verified that

User · Answer

You can get the current username on Windows by going through the Windows API, although it's a bit cumbersome to invoke via the ctypes FFI (GetCurrentProcess ? OpenProcessToken ? GetTokenInformation ? LookupAccountSid).

I wrote a small module that can do this straight from Python, getuser.py. Usage:

import getuser
print(getuser.lookup_username())

It works on both Windows and *nix (the latter uses the pwd module as described in the other answers).

User · Answer

You can also use    os getlogin

User · Answer

Look at getpass module  import getpass getpass getuser    kostya    Availability  Unix  Windows    p s  Per comment below  this function looks at the values of various environment variables to determine the user name  Therefore  this function should not be relied on for access control purposes  or possibly any other purpose  since it allows any user to impersonate any other

User · Answer

To me using os module looks the best for portability  Works best on both Linux and Windows   import os    Gives user s home directory userhome   os path expanduser                 print  User s home Dir      userhome    Gives username by splitting path based on OS print  username      os path split userhome  -1               Output   Windows      User s home Dir  C  Users myuser      username  myuser   Linux      User s home Dir   root      username  root   No need of installing any modules or extensions

User · Answer

Using only standard python libs  from os import environ getcwd getUser   lambda  environ  quot USERNAME quot   if  quot C  quot  in getcwd   else environ  quot USER quot   user   getUser    Works on Windows  if you are on drive C   Mac or Linux Alternatively  you could remove one line with an immediate invocation  from os import environ getcwd user    lambda  environ  quot USERNAME quot   if  quot C  quot  in getcwd   else environ  quot USER quot

User · Answer

If you are needing this to get user s home dir  below could be considered as portable  win32 and linux at least   part of a standard library    gt  gt  gt  os path expanduser       C   Documents and Settings  johnsmith    Also you could parse such string to get only last path component  ie  user name    See  os path expanduser

User · Answer

Combined pwd and getpass approach  based on other answers   try    import pwd except ImportError    import getpass   pwd   None  def current user      if pwd      return pwd getpwuid os geteuid    pw name   else      return getpass getuser

User · Answer

These might work   I don t know how they behave when running as a service   They aren t portable  but that s what os name and ifstatements are for   win32api GetUserName    win32api GetUserNameEx         See  http   timgolden me uk python win32 how do i get-the-owner-of-a-file html

User · Answer

For UNIX  at least  this works    import commands username   commands getoutput  quot echo   whoami  quot   print username  edit  I just looked it up and this works on Windows and UNIX  import commands username   commands getoutput  quot whoami quot    On UNIX it returns your username  but on Windows  it returns your user s group  slash  your username  -- I E  UNIX returns   quot username quot  Windows returns   quot domain username quot  -- It s interesting  but probably not ideal unless you are doing something in the terminal anyway    in which case you would probably be using os system to begin with  For example  a while ago I needed to add my user to a group  so I did  this is in Linux  mind you  import os os system  quot sudo usermod -aG   quot group name  quot    whoami  quot   print  quot You have been added to   quot group name  quot   Please log out for this to take effect quot   I feel like that is easier to read and you don t have to import pwd or getpass  I also feel like having  quot domain user quot  could be helpful in certain applications in Windows

User · Answer

You can probably use   os environ get  USERNAME     or  os environ get  USER     But it s not going to be safe because environment variables can be changed

User · Answer

I wrote the plx module some time ago to get the user name in a portable way on Unix and Windows  among other things   http   www decalage info en python plx  Usage   import plx  username   plx get username      it requires win32 extensions on Windows

User · Answer

You best bet would be to combine os getuid   with pwd getpwuid     import os import pwd  def get username        return pwd getpwuid  os getuid      0     Refer to the pwd docs for more details   http   docs python org library pwd html

User · Answer

psutil provides a portable way that doesn t use environment variables like the getpass solution   It is less prone to security issues  and should probably be the accepted answer as of today  import psutil  def get username        return psutil Process   username    Under the hood  this combines the getpwuid based method for unix and the GetTokenInformation method for Windows

[python] Is there a portable way to get the current username in Python?

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