My program is started from a service that runs under the Local System Account (a real user is logged in). One of the tasks of the program is store files on a network path, which should contain the current username e.g. \\server\\storage\\%username%, but the problem is that I get the name of the system account instead of the user account when I read the environment variable:
Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("username");
Is there a way to get the correct username in this case?
My solution was to find out which user started the explorer process:
Will only work if you reference the .NET System.Management library:
private static string GetExplorerUser()
{
var process = Process.GetProcessesByName("explorer");
return process.Length > 0
? GetUsernameByPid(process[0].Id)
: "Unknown-User";
}
private static string GetUsernameByPid(int pid)
{
var query = new ObjectQuery("SELECT * from Win32_Process "
+ " WHERE ProcessID = '" + pid + "'");
var searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(query);
if (searcher.Get().Count == 0)
return "Unknown-User";
foreach (ManagementObject obj in searcher.Get())
{
var owner = new String[2];
obj.InvokeMethod("GetOwner", owner);
return owner[0] ?? "Unknown-User";
}
return "Unknown-User";
}
Another possibility is to parse the output of the qwinsta command.
If you're not taking any measures to launch your program as a different user (CreateProcessAsUser et al.) then it's going to run as the same user as the calling program.
