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I must be doing something stupid, but I can't seem to retrieve the current username using Julia. The closest function in Base appears to be gethostname(), but that returns the computer name, not the username. I tried system calls but am having trouble due to the interpolation character $. Specifically, although echo $USER returns the appropriate username in a terminal, when I try the following in Julia I get various errors or incorrect answers:

run(`echo $USER`)
run(`echo "$USER"`)
run(`echo '$USER'`)
run(`echo '$'USER`)
run(`echo \$USER`)

I guess the issue is that Julia is misinterpreting the $ as an interpolation, but I've got no idea how to get around this.

Any ideas?

Answers

An easy workaround:

run(`whoami`)

But unnecessary, as this works:

ENV["USER"]