How to Find the User'S Home Directory in Java

What is the best way to find the user's home directory in Java?

The bug you reference (bug 4787391) has been fixed in Java 8. Even if you are using an older version of Java, the System.getProperty("user.home") approach is probably still the best. The user.home approach seems to work in a very large number of cases. A 100% bulletproof solution on Windows is hard, because Windows has a shifting concept of what the home directory means.


If user.home isn't good enough for you I would suggest choosing a definition of home directory for windows and using it, getting the appropriate environment variable with System.getenv(String).

How to get %HOMEPATH% of file system from java

String usersHomeDir = System.getProperty("user.home");

what is System.getProperty(user.home) output in windows?

It will be the home directory of the current logged in user. c:\Users\${current_user_name}

How do I get the Users Music Directory?

The correct way to get the path to special folders on Windows is to call a shell function like SHGetFolderPath with the CSIDL_* constants (CSIDL_MYMUSIC in your case).

You need to use JNI or JNA in Java to do this. Examples can be found here and here.

And for completeness, reading from the registry is not the correct way to do this...

Is there something like user.home to get the \Users\Public directory in java?

The way to find the public directory is

System.getenv("PUBLIC");

This should get something like C:\Users\Public, or if your main drive is D:, D:\Users\Public.

This Wikipedia article is a good reference for Windows environment variables.

java.io.File cannot recognize ~ symbol of home dir?

Why is this?

Because the ~ symbol is only understood by the Unix shell (and, confusingly, it was used in HTTP servers). Even if you wrote the program in C, it wouldn't understand ~ to designate the home directory of the current user.

To get the user's home directory, use System.getProperty("user.home"). (Answer from What is the best way to find the users home directory in Java?)

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