How to get the active authenticated gcloud account?

Both of these commands below will give the same result:

$ gcloud config get-value account
$ gcloud config list --format 'value(core.account)'

But when you want to set the account to be activated externally then it can be done with the json key:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ ! $(gcloud config get-value account &> /dev/null) ]]
then
    GCP_SA_KEY=<json credential key>
    GCP_ACCOUNT=service@<my_project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com 
    if [ -z $GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS ]
    then
        echo $GCP_SA_KEY > google-app-creds.json
        export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=$(realpath google-app-creds.json)
        gcloud auth activate-service-account $GCP_ACCOUNT --project=<my_project> \
        --key-file=$GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
    fi
fi

Ouput will be like this

$ bash /path/to/the/above/file
Activated service account credentials for: [service@<my_project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com] 

To take a quick anonymous survey, run: 
  $ gcloud alpha survey

$ gcloud config get-value account
service@<my_project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com

I found the solution:

gcloud config list account --format "value(core.account)"

This would tell you:

Your active configuration is: [default]

service@<my_project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com

To also avoid the active configuration message, you can redirect the stderr to /dev/null:

$ gcloud config list account --format "value(core.account)" 2> /dev/null
service@<my_project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com

It would be nice if --verbosity would also work in this case to remove the info message. That would mean:

$ gcloud config list account --format "value(core.account)" --verbosity error

Any Googlers out there that can post a comment if this is a reasonable feature/bug request/report?

This also seems to work

gcloud config get-value account