Path ... where is my application's home dir?

[Duncan Booth]

Tim Golden <tim.golden at viacom-outdoor.co.uk> wrote in 
news:mailman.81.1083164606.25742.python-list at python.org:

>>And yes, the best place to store this information would be in 
>>the user's 
>>home dir, but then: Where is it? How to find it under Windows - every 
>>version of windows changes the place for home dirs. It would 
>>be nice to 
>>have something like this in a system/version independet way:
>>
>>sys.users_home_dir
>>
>>Is there anything like it in Python?
> 
> There's nothing that strictly does that. You could
> use os.path.expanduser ("~") but in Windows (at least
> on my Win2K box) it returns "c:/" which is just about
> acceptable for a one-user machine, but obviously not
> for multi-user.
> 
> The usual way to do this on Windows is to use the
> winshell functions from pywin32:
> 
><code>
> from win32com.shell import shell, shellcon
> print shell.SHGetPathFromIDList (
>   shell.SHGetSpecialFolderLocation (0, shellcon.CSIDL_APPDATA)
> )
></code>
> 
> which, on my machine, gives:
> 
> C:\Documents and Settings\goldent\Application Data

A simpler way to get the same information:

import os
print os.environ['APPDATA']