Automatically creating a HOME environ variable on Windows?

[Micah Elliott]

Maciej Dziardziel wrote:
> > ...there is a group of path related functions in os.path (or
> > ntpath), including expanduser, and its better to use function...

On Nov 01, jim.eggleston at gmail.com wrote:
> Having a function is definitely cleaner. Creating a HOME environment
> variable where one does not exist in the calling shell is
> misleading.
> ...
> It would be nice to start of with having a standard way to find out
> what the home directory is.

I think that is what Maciej has already pointed out.

Just to clarify then:

    os.path.expanduser('~') is the universal/portable means to find a
    user's home directory, regardless of platform.  So use of HOME or
    USERPROFILE or whatever in scripts should be discouraged.

Someone please correct me if the above is wrong.  I haven't tried on a
mac, but linux and windows seem to behave well; i.e., linux looks for
HOME, and windows appears to combine HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH if HOME is
not set.  Details are in the 2.4.2 sources' "Python24/Lib/posixpath.py"
if you're curious.

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