What is the best way to find the user’s home directory in Java?
The difficulty is that the solution should be cross-platform; it should work on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, and other Unix variants. I am looking for a snippet of code that can accomplish this for all platforms, and a way to detect the platform.
Per Java bug 4787931, system property user.home does not work correctly on Windows XP, so using this system property is not an acceptable solution as it is not cross-platform.