Re: Get login name and/or path to home directory of current user?

Don Bruder <dakidd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
# I've checked everything that seems likely in the docs, but I'm coming up

# blank except for three Java methods, which don't help much, since I'm 
# coding to Carbon. 

I read the password file for the current user id. (MacOSX actually
gets the Netinfo, etc for you behind the scenes rather than just
/etc/passwd)

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <pwd.h>

int uid = getuid(); /*or geteuid()*/
struct passwd *pw = getpwuid(uid);

char *loginname = pw->pw_name;
char *homedirectory = pw->pw_dir;

For more information look at the manpages for getuid and getpwnam.


# The good news is that I always know the file's path: 
# "/Users/LoginName/Client.log", so I can easily pass it to 
# FSPathMakeRef() to get an FSRef to work with.

char fpath[] = "%s/Client.log";
char path[sizeof fpath+strlen(homedirectory)];
sprintf(path,fpath,homedirectory);

FSRef is evil.

# The bad news is that I can't figure out how to figure out who the user 
# running *MY* application is so that I can plug it into the path and get 
# an FSRef to the right user's file. 

Unix doesn't keep track of the user name, but the user id. There are
some weird things that can happen with setuid, daemons, etc, but for a
vanilla unix program running under a logged in user, the user id is
essentially the user name.

# As mentioned above, I've found three "likely suspects" in the XCode help

# system (currentFullUserName(), currentUserName(), and 
# currentHomeDirectory() ) that look like they'd do the job for me with 
# varying degrees of "make it dead simple", but all three are Java 
# methods, and I'm coding in C, to the Carbon API.

Probably they are all using getpwuid behind the scenes.

--
SM Ryan http://www.rawbw.com/~wyrmwif/
A bunch of savages in this town.