Python — Determining the Path to the User Directory

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The path to a user directory can vary depending on the operating system. For instance, if the username is “kendra”, you would deal with the following paths:

/Users/kendra  # Windows
/Users/kendra  # macOS
/home/kendra   # Linux

When writing a Python program for personal use, you could simply use the corresponding path to your user directory (i.e., /Users/<Username>). However, the situation changes when the program is intended to be run on other users’ systems. In such cases, you need a method that ensures the correct path is used regardless of the operating system. There are several options available, three of which will be introduced in this blog post.

getpass

We start with getpass, which needs to be imported first:

import getpass

With the following line, we first get the username, which is assigned to the variable user:

user = getpass.getuser()

Then, the path to the user directory can be assigned to a variable that can be used later in the code:

home = Path(f"/Users/{user}")

You could display the path using print(), which in the case of “kendra” would result in the following output:

print(home)
# -> /Users/kendra

This approach would work for Mac and Windows users. For Linux, however, the following code should be used:

home = Path(f"/home/{user}")

You could first write code to determine which operating system is used, and then, in a second step, determine the path. Of course, it would be better if the operating system being used did not have to be determined initially.

expanduser

And that brings us to the second option: expanduser. Let’s look at the code to be used:

from os.path import expanduser

home = expanduser("~")

In this example, the path to the user directory is assigned to the variable home. The respective user directory is obtained by passing the tilde character ~ to expanduser(), which stands for the user directory (for example, /home/kendra on a Linux system).

If we now use print() to display the value of home, we get the following paths:

print(home)
# -> Windows: C:\Users\kendra
# -> macOS: /Users/kendra
# -> Linux: /home/kendra

Unlike the first solution, we do not need to worry about the operating system here.

Path

Now let’s move on to the third option, using Path.home(). The code looks like this:

from pathlib import Path

home = Path.home()

print(home)
# -> Windows: C:\Users\kendra
# -> macOS: /Users/kendra
# -> Linux: /home/kendra

This method makes it very simple to construct paths. In the following example, the path to the Documents directory is assigned to the variable documents_dir:

documents_dir = Path.home() / "Documents"

With the code Path.home() / "Documents", you get a Path object pointing to the Documents folder in the respective user directory. The / operator here is an overloaded operator from the pathlib library.

Checking if the Directory Exists

When working with paths, you should also check whether the path actually exists. Again, there are various ways to do this. The pathlib library provides the method exists():

from pathlib import Path

documents_dir = Path.home() / "Documents"

if documents_dir.exists():
    print("The Documents folder exists.")
else:
    print("The Documents folder does not exist.")

Implementing exception handling is also possible:

try:
    documents_dir = Path.home() / "Documents"
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error retrieving Documents directory: {e}")
    return None