What is the best way to find the users home directory in Java?

Question

The difficulty is that it should be cross platform. Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OSX, Linux, other unix variants. I am looking for a snippet of code that can accomplish this for

Answer 1

Alternative would be to use Apache CommonsIO FileUtils.getUserDirectory() instead of System.getProperty("user.home"). It will get you the same result and there is no chance to introduce a typo when specifying system property.

There is a big chance you already have Apache CommonsIO library in your project. Don't introduce it if you plan to use it only for getting user home directory.