Find Real User Home Directory Using Python

When working with the Python scripts, it is required to interact with user-specific files or directories and also it's essential to accurately determine the actual user's home directory. This is especially important if the script might be executed with elevated privileges like using sudo where default methods could mistakenly point to /root directory instead of the true user's home.

Python offers multiple ways to retrieve the home directory and selecting the appropriate method which helps to ensure consistent and expected behavior across different environments and permission levels. In this articlE, we will go through the different methods to find the real user home directory using python.

Using pathlib.Path.home()

The pathlib.Path.home() function of the pathlib module which is used to get the home directory of the current user as a Path object. This function provides an object-oriented approach for handling filesystem paths in Python. This function is cross-platform and available in Python 3.5 and later.

Example

Following is the example, which shows how to we use the pathlib.Path.home() function to retrieve the user's home directory -

from pathlib import Path

# Get the current user's home directory
home_dir = Path.home()

print("User's home directory is:", home_dir)

Here is the output of the above program -

User's home directory is: C:\Users\91970

Using os.path.expanduser("~")

The os.path.expanduser("~") function is used to find the home directory path of the current user by expanding the tilde ~ symbol. It is platform-independent and works across Unix and Windows systems by resolving the user's home directory from environment variables.

Example

In this example, we use the os.path.expanduser("~") function to get the current user's home directory path -

import os

# Get the current user's home directory
home_dir = os.path.expanduser("~")

print("User's home directory is:", home_dir)

Here is the output of the above program -

User's home directory is: C:\Users\91970

Using os.environ["HOME"]

The os.environ["HOME"] statement accesses the HOME environment variable directly to retrieve the current user's home directory. This method is simple and works well on Unix-based systems, but it may not be reliable in all contexts, especially if the environment variable is unset or if the script is run with different user privileges.

Example

Following is an example that uses the os.environ["HOME"] expression to get the home directory -

import os

# Get the current user's home directory from the environment
home_dir = os.environ["HOME"]

print("User's home directory is:", home_dir)