Is there a portable way to get the current username in Python?

python portability username
Jacob Gabrielson picture Jacob Gabrielson · May 9, 2009 · Viewed 399.1k times · Source

Is there a portable way to get the current user's username in Python (i.e., one that works under both Linux and Windows, at least). It would work like os.getuid:

>>> os.getuid()
42
>>> os.getusername()
'slartibartfast'

I googled around and was surprised not to find a definitive answer (although perhaps I was just googling poorly). The pwd module provides a relatively easy way to achieve this under, say, Linux, but it is not present on Windows. Some of the search results suggested that getting the username under Windows can be complicated in certain circumstances (e.g., running as a Windows service), although I haven't verified that.

Answer

Konstantin Tenzin picture Konstantin Tenzin · May 9, 2009

Look at getpass module

import getpass
getpass.getuser()
'kostya'

Availability: Unix, Windows

p.s. Per comment below "this function looks at the values of various environment variables to determine the user name. Therefore, this function should not be relied on for access control purposes (or possibly any other purpose, since it allows any user to impersonate any other)."

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