How to find a user's home directory on linux or unix?

Question

How do I find the home directory of an arbitrary user from within Grails? On Linux it\'s often /home/user. However, on some OS\'s, like OpenSolaris for example, the path i

Answer 1

For an arbitrary user, as the webserver:

private String getUserHome(String userName) throws IOException{
    return new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{"sh", "-c", "echo ~" + userName}).getInputStream())).readLine();
}