Get home dir from shell

vit has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Get home dir from shell by Corion (Patriarch) on Apr 03, 2013 at 12:57 UTC
If `$ENV{HOME}` is not set, it won't be set in the shell either. Most likely, your login environment is not set up because your script is running as the CGI user, or if it is running as your user, the login / `.profile` scripts have not been run. See Get default login environment and the replies for how to set up the environment from a script.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Get home dir from shell by CountOrlok (Friar) on Apr 03, 2013 at 13:02 UTC
If your CGI script is being run from a web server like apache, you likely won't see a home directory. The script would be running as user apache, which does not have a home directory. Whose home directory are you expecting?	[reply]
Re: Get home dir from shell by kennethk (Abbot) on Apr 03, 2013 at 14:29 UTC
since it considers $HOME as a variable Which is why you escape it: perl -e 'print `echo \$HOME`' #11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Get home dir from shell by vit (Friar) on Apr 03, 2013 at 15:13 UTC
It will print $HOME	[reply]
Re^3: Get home dir from shell by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 03, 2013 at 15:43 UTC
moo@cow>perl -e 'print `echo \$HOME`' /home/moo [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Get home dir from shell by kennethk (Abbot) on Apr 03, 2013 at 16:39 UTC
~$ perl -e 'print `echo $HOME`' ~$ perl -e 'print `echo \$HOME`' /home/kennethk ~$ perl -e 'print `echo \\$HOME`' \ ~$ perl -e 'print `echo \\\$HOME`' $HOME ~$ perl -e '$q = chr 39; print `echo $q\$HOME$q`' $HOME ~$ perl -e '$loc = q{\$HOME}; print `echo $loc`' $HOME [download] Try outputting your command to make sure it's what you think it is. #11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Get home dir from shell by hdb (Monsignor) on Apr 04, 2013 at 06:36 UTC
Re: Get home dir from shell by aitap (Curate) on Apr 03, 2013 at 17:29 UTC
Don't rely on shell, use system functions instead: `my $homedir = (getpwuid($<))[7];`. $< is the real UID of the user who's running the script, and 7'th field of getpwuid($uid) is the home directory path. See also: getpwent. Sorry if my advice was wrong.	[reply] [d/l]