Cross-platform means of getting user's home directory in Ruby?

Question

Java has the convienient System.getProperty(\"user.home\") to get the user\'s \"home\" directory in a platform-independent way. What\'s the equivalent in Ruby? I

Answer 1

ENV["HOME"] or ENV["HOMEPATH"] should give you what you want.

homes = ["HOME", "HOMEPATH"]

realHome = homes.detect {|h| ENV[h] != nil}

if not realHome
   puts "Could not find home directory"
end