How to manually expand a special variable (ex: ~ tilde) in bash

Question

I have a variable in my bash script whose value is something like this:

~/a/b/c

Note that it is unexpanded tilde. When I do ls -lt on this

Answer 1

Just to extend birryree's answer for paths with spaces: You cannot use the eval command as is because it seperates evaluation by spaces. One solution is to replace spaces temporarily for the eval command:

mypath="~/a/b/c/Something With Spaces"
expandedpath=${mypath// /_spc_}    # replace spaces 
eval expandedpath=${expandedpath}  # put spaces back
expandedpath=${expandedpath//_spc_/ }
echo "$expandedpath"    # prints e.g. /Users/fred/a/b/c/Something With Spaces"
ls -lt "$expandedpath"  # outputs dir content

This example relies of course on the assumption that mypath never contains the char sequence "_spc_".