How do I get the user name of the current user?

Question

I want to access the user name in the Windows using C programming and use that name to create the path to the particular file like "c:\users\john\Roaming.....and so on". So for every system user name e.g "john" is different. Help me to find the user name at run time.

Solution 1

#include  <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("%s\n", getenv("USERPROFILE"));  // Print user's home directory.
    return 0;
}

To get the user name instead of the home path replace USERPROFILE with USERNAME.

Solution 2

What you are looking for, here, is probably more SHGetKnownFolderPath. The function lets you find per-user special folders. This is preferred to querying usernames because the home folder may not have the same name as the user.

WSTR* location;
HRESULT hr = SHGetKnownFolderPath(FOLDERID_RoamingAppData, 0, NULL, &location);
if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
{
    // location contains the folder path
    // call CoTaskMemFree to free up the memory once you're done with it
    CoTaskMemFree(location);
}

The list of so-called known folders is available here.

Solution 3

The function to get user name on windows is GetUserName

This answer, probably, will help you too.

Solution 4

you could use the following code to get the Username.

    #include <stdlib.h>

    void main(void)
    {
        //following gets the appdata folder
        char szAppData[1024];
        char * szBufer      = 0;
        szBufer = getenv ("APPDATA");
        if (szBufer != NULL)
        {
           strcpy(szBufer , szAppData);
        }

        //following code gets the user name
        char szOSUserName[1024];
        szBufer = getenv ("USERNAME");
        if (szBufer != NULL)
        {
            strcpy(szBufer , szOSUserName);
        }
    }

Solution 5

You can get the name of the current user with GetUserName:

#include <Windows.h>
#include <Lmcons.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    char name[UNLEN + 1];
    DWORD cch = UNLEN + 1;
    if (GetUserName(name, &cch))
    {
        char cmd[100 + UNLEN + 1];
        sprintf(cmd, "echo The username is \"%s\"", name); // Silly demo command
        system(cmd);
    }
    return 0;
}

Use GetUserNameEx if you want the name in a specific format.

If you need to get the path to a special folder like "My Documents" or "Desktop" you should use the special folder functions like SHGetFolderPath or SHGetKnownFolderPath.

View more solutions