What is the Windows equivalent of pwd.getpwnam(username).pw_dir?

Question

The Python pwd module provides access to getpwnam(3) POSIX API, which can be used to get the home directory for a particular user by username, as well determini

Answer 1

you could go the win32api.GetUserName() (current user only) or win32net.NetUserGetInfo() (any user on any server, localhost included) route. the latter could be a bit slow since it can take some time to get this information back from the OS.

  import win32net

  def userDir(username):
        return win32net.NetUserGetInfo(None, username, 1).get("home_dir")

alternatively you could expand the environment variable USERPROFILE on windows or HOME on unix to get the information about the currently logged in user:

  def userDir():
      if os.platform.system() == 'Windows':
          return os.environ['USERPROFILE']
      elif os.platform.system() == 'Linux':
          return os.environ['HOME'] 
      else:
          return None