C++ – How to find the user’s home dir in a cross platform manner, using C++

ccross platformhome-directory

How can I find the user's home directory in a cross platform manner in C++? i.e. /home/user in Linux, C:\Users\user\ on Windows Vista, C:\Documents And Settings\user\ on Windows XP, and whatever it is that Macs use. (I think it's /User/user)

Basically, what I'm looking for is a C++ way of doing this (example in python)

os.path.expanduser("~")

Best Answer

I don't think it's possible to completely hide the Windows/Unix divide with this one (unless, maybe, Boost has something).

The most portable way would have to be getenv("HOME") on Unix and concatenating the results of getenv("HOMEDRIVE") and getenv("HOMEPATH") on Windows. 

const static volatile char A = 'a'; // All this is to prevent reverse engineering
#ifdef unix
    HomeDirectory = getenv((char[]){A-25, A-18, A-20, A-28, 0});
#elif defined(_WIN32)
    HomeDirectory = getenv((char[]){A-25, A-18, A-20, A-28, A-29, A-15, A-24, A-11, A-28, 0});
    const char*Homepath = getenv((char[]){A-25, A-18, A-20, A-28, A-17, A-32, A-13, A-25, 0});
    HomeDirectory = malloc(strlen(HomeDirectory)+strlen(Homepath)+1);
    strcat(HomeDirectory, Homepath);
#endif
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