How do I get the name of the active user via the command line in OS X?
A:
Lawrence Johnston
2009-07-09 16:24:08
+1
A:
I'm pretty sure the terminal in OS X is just like unix, so the command would be:
whoami
I don't have a mac on me at the moment so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Eric Koslow
2009-07-09 16:26:02
yes, OSX 10.5 is (finally) a fully qualified Unix.
kent
2009-07-09 17:09:52
A:
I don't have a mac here neither, but I'd bet there's also a $USER environment variable.
fortran
2009-07-09 16:35:20
But an environment variable is utterly unreliable - I have both $USER and $LOGNAME set, but that's because I chose to ensure that both are set (to the value of my choosing). It may not matter - we don't have enough context in the question to tell how much the security and reliability matters.
Jonathan Leffler
2009-07-09 16:47:45
+5
A:
as 'whoami' has been obsoleted, it's probably more forward compatible to use:
id -un
kent
2009-07-09 16:40:56
In what sense is 'whoami' obsoleted? Who has declared it obsolete?
Jonathan Leffler
2009-07-09 16:46:28
@Jonathan: The man page for `whoami` on Leopard confirms that it has been replaced by `id`.
Naaff
2009-07-09 16:51:15
Agh! Why are they changing something that has been around since the dawn of time?
dmckee
2009-07-09 16:58:27
A:
Define 'active user'.
If the question is 'who is the logged in user', then 'who am i' or 'whoami' is fine (though they give different answers - 'whoami' reports just a user name; 'who am i' reports on terminal and login time too).
If the question is 'which user ID is the effective ID for the shell', then it is often better to use 'id'. This reports on the real and effective user ID and group ID, and on the supplementary group IDs too. This might matter if the shell is running SUID or SGID.
Jonathan Leffler
2009-07-09 16:45:44
A:
If you want to know who's currently logged in to the system:
$ w 15:56:14 up 5 days, 20:58, 6 users, load average: 0.43, 0.53, 0.50 USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT me pts/2 Fri19 1:03m 0.98s 0.98s -/bin/bash me pts/3 09:55 6:00m 0.43s 0.43s /bin/bash me pts/5 15:56 0.00s 0.23s 0.00s w
(This is from a Linux system; the formatting on OS X may be slightly different, but the information should be about the same.)
There may be multiple login sessions; UNIX is designed to be a multi-user system, after all.
ephemient
2009-07-09 19:59:36