Question

Okay, I’ve checked Environment.SpecialFolder, but there’s nothing in there for this.

I want to get the home directory of the current user in C#. (e.g. c:\documents and settings\user under XP, c:\users\user under Vista, and /home/user under Unix.)

I know I can read enviroment variables to find this out, but I want to do this in a cross-platform way.

Is there any way I can do this with .NET (preferably using mscorlib)?

UPDATE: Okay, this is the code I ended up using:

string homePath = (Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.Unix || 
                   Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.MacOSX)
    ? Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("HOME")
    : Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables("%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%");

Answer 1

Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal doesn’t actually return the home folder, it returns the My Documents folder. The safest way to get the home folder on Win32 is to read %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. Reading environment variables is actually very portable to do (across Unix and Windows), so I’m not sure why the poster wanted to not do it.

Edited to add: For crossplatform (Windows/Unix) C#, I’d read $HOME on Unix and OSX and %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% on Windows.