Is There A System Defined Environment Variable For Documents Directory?

Question

I know about the %USERPROFILE% system defined environment variable on Windows XP (and Vista and Windows 7). Is there a system defined environment variable pointing to the location of the "My Documents" directory? On XP by default it's %USERPROFILE%\My Documents and on Win 7 it's %USERPROFILE%\Documents. I just wanted to avoid having to test for the OS version in a Powershell script if I can avoid it.

Answer 1

For powershell the following works:

[environment]::getfolderpath("mydocuments") 

and avoiding magic strings

[Environment]::GetFolderPath([Environment+SpecialFolder]::MyDocuments) 

For .NET the following holds true (ie not applicable in all windows applications):

As one answer points out, there is no Environment Variable pointing to My Documents but there is Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments) (C#) for .NET.

I'm adding this answer since this question comes up when googling for C#, environment variables and my documents and Justin's answer does not contain the line of code :)

Using the above mentioned line of code is the preferred way of accessing my documents in .NET :)

Copy paste this row for C# usage:

var directoryNameOfMyDocuments = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments); 

Note that C# needs a capital D in MyDocuments.

Answer 2

On my default-installation XP system, there is no environment variable for that. You can list all variables with the "set" command ( no parameters ) in the command line. So probably you have to do a test.

If you don't want to test for the OS version, you can simply check whether "Documents" exists and if not then try "My Documents" or vice versa. This isn't perfect however, because s/o could have a "Documents" folder on his XP machine.

Btw: my system is German, so the folder is called "Dokumente". You might need to take that into account.

The path to that folder is stored in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders 

under Personal. You need registry access, though.

Source: Microsoft