What is WHOAMI utility in Windows 10 and how to use it?

WHOAMI (Who Am I) is one of the less known utilities in the Windows operating system environment. It is a powerful command-line tool, nonetheless. It was first introduced in Windows Vista, and since then, Microsoft continued bundling the utility with its Windows releases. In this guide, we intend to furnish you with the most important information on WHOAMI.

What do WHOAMI commands do?

You can run certain WHOAMI commands to get data on the user currently logged in on your computer. The details might include the following: login name or name of the account, the names of the security groups the user belongs to, available privileges, and so on.

If you need to view specific user name and group information, you can use the WHOAMI utility to bring up security identifiers (SID), privileges, logon identifier for the account or profile currently logged in on your computer.

How to use the WHOAMI utility on Windows 10

Here, we intend to walk you through some basic operations involving the WHOAMI utility on Windows 10. First, you need to get a Command Prompt window up and running. You can perform this task by right-clicking on the Windows icon (in the bottom-left corner of your device’s screen) to see the Power User menu programs and options and then choosing Command Prompt from the list.

• Use the basic command: whoami

If you execute whoami in the Command Prompt window, you will see the current domain and username or just username (if the logged-in user does not belong to a domain).

• Use this command to find out which group you (or the currently logged in user) belong to: whoami /groups

If the user involved is a domain user, then Windows will list all the domain groups to which the user belongs.

• Use this command to find out your SID: whoami /user

• Use this command to view your LogonID: whoami /logonid

• Use this command to see your FDQN: whoami /fqdn

The command here only applies when the account involved belongs to a domain or when the current user is domain-based.

• Use this command to view everything that matters: whoami /all

• Use this command to display the output in List format (if you consider the default format bad or ugly): whoami /all /fo list

We have examined enough operations involving the WHOAMI utility on Windows.

WHOAMI Windows command list

• /UPN: This command forces Windows to show the user name in the User Principal Name (UPN) format.
• /FQDN: This command instructs Windows to display the user name in Fully Qualified Distinguished Name (FQDN) format.
• /USER: This command forces Windows to display some information on the current user (or logged in account) alongside the security identifier (SID).
• /GROUPS: This command instructs Windows to show the group membership list for the current user (or logged in account) and these details alongside it: type of account, security identifiers (SID), and attributes.
• /PRIV: This command forces Windows to show the security privileges the current user or logged in account possess.
• /LOGONID: This command instructs Windows to show the logon ID of the current user or logged in account.
• /ALL: This command is used to view the current user name or logged-in account name, groups they belong to alongside the security identifiers (SID) associated with them, and privileges for the current user access token.
• /FO format: This command is used to specify the output format to be displayed. These are the valid values: TABLE, LIST, CSV.  Column headings will not be presented with the CSV format. You must know the default format is TABLE.
• /NH:  This command is used to specify that the column header must not be displayed in the output. It can only be used with TABLE and CSV formats.
• /?: This command instructs Windows to display some help message.

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