whoami in python [duplicate]

Question

What is the best way to find out the user that a python process is running under?

I could do this:

name = os.popen('whoami').read()  

But that has to start a whole new process.

os.environ["USER"] 

works sometimes, but sometimes that environment variable isn't set.

Answer 1

import getpass print(getpass.getuser()) 

See the documentation of the getpass module.

getpass.getuser()

Return the “login name” of the user. Availability: Unix, Windows.

This function checks the environment variables LOGNAME, USER, LNAME and USERNAME, in order, and returns the value of the first one which is set to a non-empty string. If none are set, the login name from the password database is returned on systems which support the pwd module, otherwise, an exception is raised.