Comment (by Roland Haas):

ugh, I did not know that. Checking… Simfactory has “workarounds”:

def GetUsername():

    if "USER" not in os.environ:
        fd = simenv.popen("whoami")
        username = fd.read().strip()
        fd.close()

    else:
        username = os.environ["USER"]

    return username

What’s wrong with os.getlogin() which is the first answer that Google finds for “Python get user name”: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-get-the-current-username-in-python/ and apparently part of Python since forever?
I’ll make a pull request for simfactory as well.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2612/getcomponents-assumes-that-user-is-defined