BUG: System.getProperty("user.home") Returns Java Home Directory

• Microsoft Visual J++, version 6.0
• Microsoft Win32 Virtual Machine

SYMPTOMS

According to the documentation, System.getProperty("user.home") should return a String containing the user's home directory. Instead, the Microsoft virtual machine (Microsoft VM) returns the Java home directory, which is also returned by a call to System.getProperty("java.home").

RESOLUTION

While there are no known pure Java workarounds, there are a couple of things to try using Win32 code. To get the user's home directory, you could do the following:

• Use the USERPROFILE environment variable in Windows NT to determine the user's home directory by making a JDirect call to the Win32 API function GetEnvironmentVariable( ). (For Windows 9x users, require the user to set USERPROFILE on boot.)



• Use Win32's GetWindowsDirectory( ) and WFC's getUserName( ) to find the user's home directory.



• Use WFC's getUserName( ) method to create a directory under "C:\A_KNOWN_DIRECTORY\[username]".

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

© Microsoft Corporation 1999, All Rights Reserved.
Contributions by Joseph B. Hall, Microsoft Corporation

Additional query words:

Keywords          : kbdocfix kbJavaVM kbSDKJava kbVJ600bug kbGrpJava 
Version           : WINDOWS:6.0
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbbug 

Last Reviewed: July 27, 1999