Question

I am trying get the parent folder of a Windows user’s profile path. But I couldn’t find any “parameter” to get this using SHGetSpecialFolderPath, so far I am using CSIDL_PROFILE.

Expected Path:

Win7 – “C:\Users”

Windows XP – “C:\Documents and Settings”

Answer 1

With the shell libary version 6.0 you have the CSIDL_PROFILES (not to be confused with CSIDL_PROFILE) which gives you what you want. This value was removed (see here), you have to use your own workaround.

On any prior version you’ll have to implement your own workaround, such as looking for the possible path separator(s), i.e. \ and / on Windows, and terminate the string at the last one. A simple version of this could use strrchr (or wcsrchr) to locate the backslash and then, assuming the string is writable, terminate the string at that location.

Example:

char* path;
// Retrieve the path at this point, e.g. "C:\\Users\\username"
char* lastSlash = strrchr(path, '\\');
if(!lastSlash)
  lastSlash = strrchr(path, '/');
if(lastSlash)
  *lastSlash = 0;

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Or of course GetProfilesDirectory (that eluded me) which you pointed out in a comment to this answer.