What is the best way to find the user's home directory in Java?
cross-platform, home-directory, java
Solution
The bug you reference (bug 4787391) has been fixed in Java 8. Even if you are using an older version of Java, the `System.getProperty("user.home")` approach is probably still the best. The `user.home` approach seems to work in a very large number of cases. A 100% bulletproof solution on Windows is hard, because Windows has a shifting concept of what the home directory means. If `user.home` isn't good enough for you I would suggest choosing a definition of `home directory` for windows and using it, getting the appropriate environment variable with `System.getenv(String)`.
Problem
What is the best way to find the user's home directory in Java? The difficulty is that the solution should be cross-platform; it should work on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, and other Unix variants. I am looking for a snippet of code that can accomplish this for all platforms, and a way to detect the platform. Per Java bug 4787931, system property `user.home` does not work correctly on Windows XP, so using this system property is not an acceptable solution as it is not cross-platform.