There are various suggestions on how to determine the current username on a windows command shell without using whoami, such as this question or this question. The generic answer seems to be echo %username%. However, when I do this (on Windows XP), the shell answers with %username%. Am I missing something?
3 Answers
If you're doing this as part of a pentesting lab, you can use Kali's inbuilt whoami.exe located at
/usr/share/windows-binaries/whoami.exeJust copy it over and run on the Win XP machine.
maybe you are missing the USERNAME environment variable for some reason. Run the set command and it will list the environment variables and their values. My XP has USERNAME and I didn't add it, so XP has it.. it's strange yours doesn't. But run set and see what you have
A bunch of environment variables have the user
TEMP=C:\DOCUME~1\User\LOCALS~1\Temp
TMP=C:\DOCUME~1\User\LOCALS~1\Temp
USERNAME=user
USERPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\userAdded
In an example similar to the one you are in.. Here I have logged into the machine remotely, it runs bvsshserver (bitvise ssh server aka winsshd) (which when logged into even from cygwin client, will give a windows command line) though openssh server via cygwin gives bash.. You can use the openssh client in cygwin to log into bitvise sshd and get a windows command line
SystemRoot=C:\WINDOWS
TEMP=C:\DOCUME~1\WINSSH~1\LOCALS~1\Temp
TMP=C:\DOCUME~1\WINSSH~1\LOCALS~1\Temp
USERNAME=WinSSHD_VirtualUsers
USERPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\WinSSHD_VirtualUsers
VIRTGROUP=Virtual Users
VIRTUSER=user
windir=C:\WINDOWS
C:\>whoami
WinSSHD_VirtualUsers
C:\>In this case "VIRTUSER" has the username, though different to the one shown by whoami.
What SSH server(or remote logging in program server) does your XP machine run?
6You're not missing anything. Perhaps you're running it in powershell? If you're not getting the correct value returned from cmd, that's something you'll have to investigate further.
When in a Windows command prompt (cmd not PowerShell), enter:
echo %username%When in PowerShell, enter:
# Returns computername/username
whoami
# Returns username
echo $env:username
# Returns table containing computer/usernem
Get-WMIObject -class Win32_ComputerSystem | select username
