Getting Full User Name

Question

How do I look up my full user name in Ubuntu? I want this information to propagate to the environment variables GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL.

Answer 1

These fields in the /etc/passwd file are called GECOS fields. Unfortunately, I cannot find a single command to get this single field such as the full name. I believe this cannot be done without using shell scripting. Below are two approaches.

• Parse passwd directly:

  getent passwd $USER | cut -d ':' -f 5 | cut -d ',' -f 1
  Gert van Dijk
  

• Use of finger

  finger -m $USER | head -n 1 | sed 's/\(.*\)Name\:\s\(.*\)$/\2/g'
  Gert van Dijk
  

Related question on SO: What's the easiest way to get a user's full name on a Linux/POSIX system?

For programming in C, this is more elegant by using getpwnam().

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But really, for use in Git for a single user do:

git config --global user.name "Your Full Name"
git config --global user.email "user@example.tld"