How do I get the current username in Windows PowerShell?

How do I get the current username in Windows PowerShell?

`[Environment]::UserName` returns just the user name. E.g. __bob__
`[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name` returns the user name, prefixed by its domain where appropriate. E.g. __SOMEWHERENICE\bob__

I'd like to throw in the [whoami][1] command, which basically is a nice alias for doing `%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%` as proposed in other answers.

Write-Host "current user:"
Write-Host $(whoami)


[1]:

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`$env:username` is the easiest way

In my case, I needed to retrieve the username to enable the script to change the path, ie. `c:\users\%username%\`. I needed to start the script by changing the path to the users desktop. I was able to do this, with help from above and elsewhere, by using the **get-location** applet.

You may have another, or even better way to do it, but this worked for me:

$Path = Get-Location

Set-Location $Path\Desktop

If you're used to batch, you can call

$user=$(cmd.exe /c echo %username%)

This basically steals the output from what you would get if you had a batch file with just "echo %username%".

I didn't see any [Add-Type][1] based examples. Here is one using the GetUserName directly from advapi32.dll.

$sig = @'
[DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern bool GetUserName(System.Text.StringBuilder sb, ref Int32 length);
'@

Add-Type -MemberDefinition $sig -Namespace Advapi32 -Name Util

$size = 64
$str = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder -ArgumentList $size

[Advapi32.util]::GetUserName($str, [ref]$size) |Out-Null
$str.ToString()

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Just building on the work of others here:

[String] ${stUserDomain},[String] ${stUserAccount} = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name.split("\")

I have used `$env:username` in the past, but a colleague pointed out it's an environment variable and can be changed by the user and therefore, if you really want to get the current user's username, you shouldn't trust it.

I'd upvote Mark Seemann's answer:
[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name

But I'm not allowed to. With Mark's answer, if you need just the username, you may have to parse it out since on my system, it returns `hostname\username` and on domain joined machines with domain accounts it will return `domain\username`.

I would not use `whoami.exe` since it's not present on all versions of Windows, and it's a call out to another binary and may give some security teams fits.

Now that [PowerShell Core][1] (aka v6) has been released, and people may want to write cross-platform scripts, many of the answers here will not work on anything other than Windows.

`[Environment]::UserName` appears to be the best way of getting the current username on all platforms supported by PowerShell Core if you don't want to add platform detection and special casing to your code.

[1]:

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