Question

I’m having problem with listing home directory of current user without knowing absolute path to it. I’ve tried with the following, but it doesn’t work:

[root@blackbox source]# python
Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Dec  7 2011, 20:38:36)
[GCC 4.4.6 20110731 (Red Hat 4.4.6-3)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.listdir('/root')
['python', '.bashrc', '.viminfo']
>>> os.listdir('~')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~'
>>>

Answer 1

You need to use the os.path.expanduser() function:

>>> import os.path
>>> os.path.expanduser('~')
'/home/username'