Re: Getting the Windows current user

["Lukas Beeler" <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/11/07, Mark Villa <iseries.4.me@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Imagine that you can not use Microsoft products - or rather you want
> to do this as generic as possible. A call to "C" then possibly going

There's the Environment Variable %USERNAME%, which seems to be pretty
generic to me as a way to retrieve the current username. Getting the
current username is always operating system specific.

> to 'Netapi32.dll' is required. I am leaning toward getting current
> office user.

Office doesn't authenticate users.

> I was just looking for a registry entry I could rely on

The registry is for storing configuration information, not usernames.

> as a simple implementation - I think the actual logon is encrypted
> number that decodes to the current user.

Yes and No. Internally, Windows uses a SID (Security Identifier) to
identify the user.
This number looks like this:

S-1-5-12-7623811015-3361044348-030300820-1013

It can be resolved to a human readable username. It's actually more or
less the same as the Unix UID system, which just uses integers to keep
track of a user (e.G. root has Uid 0, and everyone else is just a
normal users - by convention, some Unix variants use UID 1 - 999 for
system users, and everything starting from 1000 are actual users).

i5/OS is different here - it uses actual profile name as an identifier
throughout the OS. This has several disadvantages, though:

* Restricts length of username to 10 chars
* Users cannot be renamed

Still, it would help if you could say what you actually want to achieve...