How do I find a user's home directory in Perl?

Question

I need to check whether a file in a user\'s home directory exists so use file check:

if ( -e \"~/foo.txt\" ) {
   print \"yes, it exists!\" ;
}

Answer 1

The home directory for a user is stored in /etc/passwd. The best way to get at the information is the getpw* functions:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict;
use warnings;

print "uid:", (getpwuid 501)[7], "\n",
    "name:", (getpwnam "cowens")[7], "\n";

To address your specific problem, try this code:

if ( -e (getpwuid $>)[7] . "/foo.txt" ) {
   print "yes ,it exists!";
}