How to use the Whoami command

"Who am I;" is a philosophical question for late night discussions. Whoami, on the other hand, is an extremely useful Windows command.

When you run the whoami command in a Windows command prompt box with no additional commands, you will see the minimum details: the current domain and username, in the form \ domain \ username (if you are logged in to a local account or a Microsoft account , the domain will display your computer name).

Run the Whoami command with /? and you will see the help that displays the options for displaying and formatting additional information for the currently logged in user account.

For best results, use the whoami / all command, and it will display the security ID (SID) for the current user, along with information about team members and privileges.

The / fo list switch changes the default panel display (which can be difficult to read) to a neat list.

Use the / fo csv switch to change the appearance of the results to comma-separated values, which you can enter into a spreadsheet.

WHOAMI Parameter list:

/ UPN : displays the user name in User Principal Name (UPN) format.
/ FQDN : displays the user name in Fully Qualified Distinguished Name (FQDN) format.
/ USER : displays information about the logged in user along with the security identifier (SID).
/ GROUPS : displays the group membership for the logged in user, account type, security identifiers (SID) and properties.
/ PRIV : displays the security privileges for the logged in user.
/ LOGONID : displays the logon ID for the logged in user.
/ ALL: Displays user name for the logged in user, groups, security identifiers (SID) and privileges.
/ FO format : output format in TABLE, LIST, CSV values.
/ NH : tells the column header not to appear in the output. Works only for TABLE and CSV formats.
/? : help.