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

A safe way to use eval is "$(printf "~/%q" "$dangerous_path")". Note that is bash specific.

#!/bin/bash

relativepath=a/b/c
eval homedir="$(printf "~/%q" "$relativepath")"
echo $homedir # prints home path

See this question for details

Also, note that under zsh this would be as as simple as echo ${~dangerous_path}

Answer 2

Just use eval correctly: with validation.

case $1${1%%/*} in
([!~]*|"$1"?*[!-+_.[:alnum:]]*|"") ! :;;
(*/*)  set "${1%%/*}" "${1#*/}"       ;;
(*)    set "$1" 
esac&& eval "printf '%s\n' $1${2+/\"\$2\"}"

Answer 3

How about this:

path=`realpath "$1"`

Or:

path=`readlink -f "$1"`

Answer 4

Here's my solution:

#!/bin/bash


expandTilde()
{
    local tilde_re='^(~[A-Za-z0-9_.-]*)(.*)'
    local path="$*"
    local pathSuffix=

    if [[ $path =~ $tilde_re ]]
    then
        # only use eval on the ~username portion !
        path=$(eval echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
        pathSuffix=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
    fi

    echo "${path}${pathSuffix}"
}



result=$(expandTilde "$1")

echo "Result = $result"

Answer 5

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_".

Answer 6

If the variable var is input by the user, eval should not be used to expand the tilde using

eval var=$var  # Do not use this!

The reason is: the user could by accident (or by purpose) type for example var="$(rm -rf $HOME/)" with possible disastrous consequences.

A better (and safer) way is to use Bash parameter expansion:

var="${var/#\~/$HOME}"