whoami in python

Question

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

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What is the best way to find out the user that a python process is running under?

I could do this:

name = os.popen('whoami').read()

But that has to start a whole new process.

os.environ["USER"]

works sometimes, but sometimes that environment variable isn't set.

Answer 1

This should work under Unix.

import os
print os.getuid() # numeric uid
import pwd
print pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()) # full /etc/passwd info

Answer 2

import getpass
print getpass.getuser()

See the documentation of the getpass module.

getpass.getuser()

Return the “login name” of the user. Availability: Unix, Windows.

This function checks the environment variables LOGNAME, USER, LNAME and USERNAME, in order, and returns the value of the first one which is set to a non-empty string. If none are set, the login name from the password database is returned on systems which support the pwd module, otherwise, an exception is raised.