Get name of current user

Question

What is a cross-platform way of getting the username of the current user in R? I am currently using

system('whoami', intern=TRUE)

However this assumes that the user has shell access, and that the whoami program is available. Is there a more native to get this information in R?

Swordsman

Without R How do people do it in windows usually ? I don't have a windows machine – Mckee

Answer 1

I would do this :

 Sys.getenv("USERNAME")  ## works under windows

or better more robust:

 Sys.info()[["user"]]

But under unix-like system the result is sometimes different of system('whoami', intern=TRUE) :

whoami outputs the username that the user is working under, whereas $USER outputs the username that was used to login.

For example, if the user logged in as John and su into root, whoami displays root and echo $USER displays John. This is because the su command does not invoke a login shell by default.

Gazetteer

This approach supposed that "USERNAME" variable is already set. I'm using Arch Linux and this is not set by default in my setting but "USER" is set. I think the last approach is more robust or Sys.getenv("USER") – Mckee

IIRC, you can use Sys.info()[["effective_user"]] to get the same output as whoami. – Dichloride

Perfect! I can't believe I didn't know about Sys.info. I searched the manuals for at least 2 minutes! :) – Swordsman