How to find a user's home directory on linux or unix?

Question

How do I find the home directory of an arbitrary user from within Grails? On Linux it's often /home/user. However, on some OS's, like OpenSolaris for example, the path is /export/home/user.

Answer 1

For UNIX-Like systems you might want to execute "echo ~username" using the shell (so use Runtime.exec() to run {"/bin/sh", "-c", "echo ~username"}).