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

If you want to find a specific user's home directory, I don't believe you can do it directly.

When I've needed to do this before from Java I had to write some JNI native code that wrapped the UNIX getpwXXX() family of calls.