whoami is a command found on most Unix-like operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It is a concatenation of the words "Who am I?" and prints the effective userid (username) of the current user when invoked.

On Unix-like operating systems, the output of the command is slightly different from $USER because whoami outputs the username that the user is working under, whereas $USER outputs the username that was used to login. For example, if the user logged in as John and su into root, whoami displays root and echo $USER displays John. This is because the su command does not invoke a login shell by default.

The GNU version was written by Richard Mlynarik and is part of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils).

The command is also available as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit^[1] and Windows XP SP2 Support Tools^[2].

Example

# whoami
root

See also

• logname
• id
• who
• User identifier (Unix)
• List of Unix programs

References

External links

• Microsoft TechNet Whoami article

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