How to find out %COMPUTERNAME% and %USERNAME% ??

What the title says.

How do I find out on which machine (computer) MATLAB is running? (Windows CMD variable %COMPUTERNAME%)

How do I find out the name of the user who is logged in? (Windows CMD variable %USERNAME%)

The Matlab help is of no use since none of the search terms "user name", "machine name" and "hostname" lead me to anything useful...

many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Daniel Shub]

With java you can do this in an OS independent manner:

char(java.lang.System.getProperty('user.name'));
char(java.net.InetAddress.getLocalHost.getHostName);

[Alec Jacobson]

Unlike the genenv solutions above, this does work on Mac OS X.

Answer 2

[Ken Atwell]

GETENV is a somewhat more "graceful" way to do this:

 getenv('COMPUTERNAME')

Answer 3

[Fangjun Jiang]

or

getenv('username')
getenv('computername')

[Alec Jacobson]

neither of these work on Mac OS X.

[Walter Roberson]

This works fine on osx: it gives back the empty string in both cases, which is exactly what is appropriate when asked to provide system specific information. The question was not about how to fetch the username and computer name on Windows, it was about how to access those particular variables.

The osx equivalent variables are USER and HOSTNAME . USER should be available on on shells, but HOSTNAME might not be available if you have reconfigured the default system shell to csh or you dug out an old sh source somewhere and compiled that and made it your default system shell. Posix does not mandate that the environment variable exists... but the default shell for osx does define it.

I am not sure what the default shell is for the various Linux systems. I am sure it is not csh, but I cannot promise it is ksh or bash instead of sh.... Posix does mandate some shell features that were in ksh but not in sh, but that doesn't matter to Linux systems because Linux is not Posix.

Answer 4

[David]

Ooooh never mind I found the answer...

>> [s,computername] = dos('ECHO %COMPUTERNAME%')

s =

       0

computername =

VARESE

>> [s,username] = dos('ECHO %USERNAME%')

s =

       0

username =

myusername

:)

Answer 5

[David]

Thanks for the tips! getenv seems like just the thing I was looking for. (All comps are Windows, software won't be shipped out any time soon...)