How can I get the user's long name?

[dickguertin]

On Tiger or Leopard (or any other Mac OSX), how can I obtain the user's "long name" from the system? Is there any command in Terminal.app that will return the user's long name, by itself or with other information? For example, I want to get "Dick Guertin" if that person's Desktop is the active Desktop.

[ganbustein]

To get your own long name:

user=$(id -un)
dscl . read /Users/$user RealName | tail -1

To get the long name of the user owning the GUI:

user=$(stat -f%Su /dev/console)
dcsl . read /Users/$user RealName | tail -1

[dickguertin]

Thank you! I've search the web for this and couldn't find it. I've turned it into a script:

#!/bin/bash
myname=$(dscl . read /Users/$USER RealName | tail -1)
myname=${myname/RealName: /}
echo "$myname"
exit 0

[ganbustein]

You can leave out the "| tail -1" part, then. On Lion, the output from the dscl command is on two lines, with "RealName:" on the first line and the the full name (with a leading space) on the second line. The "tail -1" part was to discard that first line.

But I see now that on Snow Leopard it comes out as one line, and the tail command does nothing interesting. Storing the output in a variable as you do (to normalize whitespace) and then deleting the "RealName: " prefix works on both Snow Leopard and Lion.

I'll remind you that $USER is your username, not necessarily the username of the user whose Desktop is the active Desktop. (They can be different if you've ssh'ed into the computer, or if this is part of a launchd'ed background task.) You have to stat /dev/console to find out who owns the screen.

[dickguertin]

Leaving tail -1 allows it to work on Tiger through Lion. The deletion only happens on one-line responses, like Tiger and Leopard. $USER is sufficient for my needs, but anyone who needs to can change the script according to your prescription. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction. Even the man-page for "dscl" doesn't show all the output fields, so I couldn't find this with "man -k ..." logic.

[regulus6633]

Here's a one-liner using a simple applescript command. You can run this from the command line and note that you can get the "short user name" instead if you wish. There's lots of useful information that you can pull from the command "get system info".

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

[dickguertin]

Wonderful! An alternative method. Thanks Hank.