How can I get the current user's username in Bash?

Question

I am writing a program in Bash that needs to get the user's username.

I have heard of a thing called whoami, but I have no idea what it does or how to use it.

What command do I use to get the current username?

Answer 1

On the command line, enter

whoami 

or

echo "$USER" 

To save these values to a variable, do

myvariable=$(whoami) 

or

myvariable=$USER 

Of course, you don't need to make a variable since that is what the $USER variable is for.

Answer 2

An alternative to whoami is id -u -n.

id -u will return the user id (e.g. 0 for root).