Get Users Home Directory – Part 1

In a recent application I needed to create several property list files (plists) to store application information. I opted to store the files in the folder named “Documents” off the home folder.

Here is the code I used to specify the path where I wanted the files written and the code to build an NSString with the full path.

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// Folder and file name
#define USER_PLIST_FULLPATH @"/Documents/User.plist"
 
// Path to the user property list
NSString  *plistPath;
plistPath = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingString:USER_PLIST_FULLPATH];
 
// Check for existence of the file
if ([[NSFileManager defaultManager] fileExistsAtPath:plistPath])
  ...
else
  ...

The key to making this work is NSHomeDirectory() a low level C function that returns the path to the current user’s home directory. See the document Low-Level File Management Programming Topics for the specifics on working with the file system.

In the next post I’ll show another means to generate paths to files, arguably a better approach as it uses the provided frameworks for building paths (versus hardcoding as shown here).

Important Note: There is a /Documents directory created in the sandbox for each iPhone application. In other words, the plist file that I created above will not clash with a file of the same name in another iPhone application.