How can I find the user's home dir in a cross platform manner, using C++?

Question

How can I find the user\'s home directory in a cross platform manner in C++? i.e. /home/user in Linux, C:\\Users\\user\\ on Windows Vista, C:\\Documents And Settings\\user\\

Answer 1

This is possible, and the best way to find it is to study the source code of os.path.expanduser("~"), it is really easy to replicate the same functionality in C.

You'll have to add some #ifdef directives to cover different systems.

Here are the rules that will provide you the HOME directory

• Windows: env USERPROFILE or if this fails, concatenate HOMEDRIVE+HOMEPATH
• Linux, Unix and OS X: env HOME or if this fails, use getpwuid() (example code)

Important remark: many people are assuming that HOME environment variable is always available on Unix but this is not true, one good example would be OS X.

On OS X when you run an application from GUI (not console) this will not have this variable set so you need to use the getpwuid().