Namespace conflicts can be interesting. Especially with multiple local domains. To grab the path of a directory domain of a currently logged in user (when running as the user) using a script, you can run the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep AppleMetaNodeLocation | awk '{print $2}' You can then replace the string we’re using with grep if you’d like to pull a different attribute from the user record, you’d use the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep UniqueID | awk '{print $2}'