Thread: How to get the user's home directory

You could use macros. Can't you write specific checks to see if you're on a Windows architecture or not?

It'd be like

Code:

#if Windows
...
#endif

#if Linux
...
#endif

I know that I've seen architecture checks before so I'm really just assuming here.

Alright, I found this : http://sourceforge.net/p/predef/wiki/OperatingSystems/

Basically, these are just the names of the different operating systems.

So you'd type something like

Code:

#if __linux__
...
#endif

Wow, that's really cool!
I didn't know you can do that with preprocessing macros.
The only preprocessing conditional I knew there was is #ifndef ...

Thanks.

For Windows you need to get both HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH to put the result together to get the home directory. See this article from MSDN
GetWindowsDirectory function (Windows)

Here is a way you can use the symbol _WIN32 to make a somewhat portable function to get the home directory of the current user

Code:

char *get_homedir(void)
{
    char homedir[MAX_PATH];
#ifdef _WIN32
    snprintf(homedir, MAX_PATH, "%s%s", getenv("HOMEDRIVE"), getenv("HOMEPATH"));
#else
    snprintf(homedir, MAX_PATH, "%s", getenv("HOME"));
#endif
    return strdup(homedir);
}

Windows 7 has the "HOME" environment variable, that shows the full path (C:\users\username) of the home directory. It's likely that Vista had it as well, although I don't have the ability to check at the moment, and it stands to reason that newer (ie. 8, 8.1) versions also define "HOME"