Retrieve current user's full name, Mac OS X

Alec Jacobson

December 05, 2009

weblog/

osascript is a command that allows you to execute applescript via the command line and in script. Here's a short command that retrieves the current users full name.

osascript -e "long user name of (system info)"

Anyone know how to do this in pure bash/unix tools? Update: Gmail Notifier corrupted my osascript so now I have to send the bogus errors to /dev/null like this:

osascript -e "long user name of (system info)" 2>/dev/null

Update: Here's another way I found the long user name:

system_profiler  | grep "User Name:" | sed "s/^      User Name: \([^(]*\) (.*/\1/g"

Update: On linux consider using this:

getent passwd $USER | cut -d ":" -f 5