Identifying the user

[Daedelus]

Does anyone know a simple, fool-proof way of identifying the user in the Korn shell?

The environment variable USER is writable, so anyone can change its value to whatever they want.
For a while I thought that LOGNAME would do it, but then I realized that you can get around its protections and change its value as well.

The best I have come up with so far is to create a temporary file, do a ls -l on it, and read in the owner name.

Somewhere, though, the system has to have stored who the current user is, and I ought to be able to read this information without pulling stunts like that.

 

[cruel]

you could execute whoami command or use the format $(whoami)

 

[Daedelus]

Thanks! I figured there had to be something simple I was overlooking. Alas, since I know who I am, it never occurred to me to ask! ;-)

 

[charlieehler]

Hello Daedelus,
I thought you might want to know who the user really is so the "who am i" command will tell you the original logon name even after multiple su's.
Later!
Charlie Ehler