What is the best way to find the users home directory in Java?

java cross-platform home-directory
Bruno Ranschaert picture Bruno Ranschaert · Feb 25, 2009 · Viewed 248.5k times · Source

The difficulty is that it should be cross platform. Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OSX, Linux, other unix variants. I am looking for a snippet of code that can accomplish this for all platforms, and a way to detect the platform.

Now, you should be aware of bug 4787931 that user.home does not work correctly, so please do not provide me of textbook answers, I can find these myself in the manuals.

Answer

DJClayworth picture DJClayworth · Feb 25, 2009

The bug you reference (bug 4787391) has been fixed in Java 8. Even if you are using an older version of Java, the System.getProperty("user.home") approach is probably still the best. The user.home approach seems to work in a very large number of cases. A 100% bulletproof solution on Windows is hard, because Windows has a shifting concept of what the home directory means.

If user.home isn't good enough for you I would suggest choosing a definition of home directory for windows and using it, getting the appropriate environment variable with System.getenv(String).

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