Special Environment Variables (Cont.)

LOGNAME, USER and who am i.

These variables are often used to determine the name of the user the process is currently running as. Note that the real user name might differ from the name stored in this variable (e.g. when using 'su' without the '-' flag).

Home directories and HOME.

'HOME' contains the full path to the home directory of the current user. Another way to get this directory is using the info found in the '/etc/passwd' file.