Finding user's home dir

[Steve Holden]

Nemesis wrote:

> Hi all, I'm trying to write a multiplatform function that tries to
> return the actual user home directory. I saw that
> os.path.expanduser("~") works on Linux but on Windows2000 (at least on
> the win I used) it returns %USERPROFILE%, so I tried os.environ["HOME"]
> and it gave me the same results. So I ended up with
> os.environ["USERPROFILE"], it doesn't work on Linux but (at least) on
> Windows2000 it returns the correct information
> 
> I googled a little bit and it seems that there is no general solution,
> so I tried to merge what I found, and I wrote this little function:
> 
> def getHomeDir():
>     ''' Try to find user's home directory, otherwise return current directory.'''
>     try:
>         path1=os.path.expanduser("~")
>     except:
>         path1=""
>     try:
>         path2=os.environ["HOME"]
>     except:
>         path2=""
>     try:
>         path3=os.environ["USERPROFILE"]
>     except:
>         path3=""
> 
>     if not os.path.exists(path1):
>         if not os.path.exists(path2):
>             if not os.path.exists(path3):
>                 return os.getcwd()
>             else: return path3
>         else: return path2
>     else: return path1
> 
> Please, could you test it on your systems and tell me what you got?
> I'd like to know what it returns on different operating systems because
> I'm developing a multiplatform software.
> 
> Thank you all.

It works on Cygwin too!

regards
  Steve
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