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

For Bash, KornShell (ksh), sh, etc. Many of your questions are quickly answered by either:

man [function]

to get the documentation for the system you are using or usually more conveniently:

google "man function"

This may give different results for some things where Linux and Unix have modest differences.

For this question, just enter "whoami" in your shell.

To script it:

myvar=$(whoami)