How can I get the current user's username in Bash?

Question

I am writing a program in Bash that needs to get the user\'s username.

I have heard of a thing called whoami, but I have no idea what it does or how to use it.

W

Answer 1

A hack the I've used on Solaris 9 and Linux and which works fine for both of them:

ps -o user= -p $$ | awk '{print $1}'

This snippet prints the name of the user with the current EUID.

NOTE: you need Bash as the interpreter here.

On Solaris you have problems with methods, described above:

• id does not accept the -u and -n parameters (so you will have to parse the output)
• whoami does not exist (by default)
• who am I prints owner of current terminal (ignores EUID)
• $USER variable is set correctly only after reading profile files (for example, /etc/profile)