How to Get the Home Directory of the Currently Logged-in User in Python?

Cross-Platform Home Directory Retrieval

Determining the home directory of the currently logged-on user is essential for accessing user-specific files and resources. While the os.getenv("HOME") approach works on Linux, its limitation on Windows platforms necessitates a cross-platform solution.

Cross-Platform Approach

To retrieve the home directory path regardless of the operating system, consider the following options:

1. Pathlib.Path.home() (Python 3.5 and above):
   This method returns a pathlib.PosixPath object representing the user's home directory. It can be converted to a string using str().
2. os.path.expanduser (Python versions below 3.5):
   This function can be used to expand "~" in a path to the user's home directory.

For example, on Linux and Windows, these approaches would respectively return the paths "/home/username" and "C:Usersusername".

Code Examples

Python 3.5 and above:

from pathlib import Path

home = Path.home()

# example usage:
with open(home / ".ssh" / "known_hosts") as f:
    lines = f.readlines()

Older Python versions:

from os.path import expanduser

home = expanduser("~")

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