tilde-expansion

Assume someuser has a home directory /home/someuser NAME=someuser In bash - what expression to I use combining tilde (~) and $NAME to return the users home directory? HOMEDIRECTORY=~someuser echo $HOMEDIRECTORY /home/someuser NAME=someuser echo ~$NAME ~someuser any suggestions? Safer : eval HOMEDIRECTORY="$(printf "~%q" "$NAME")" Here the %q option to printf quotes and escapes dangerous characters. If $NAME is joe, you'd get something like /home/joe . For root, you might get /root . For "abc;rm something" you'd get "~abc;rm something" instead of having something removed. If you have access to

I need to check whether a file in a user's home directory exists so use file check: if ( -e "~/foo.txt" ) { print "yes, it exists!" ; } Even though there is a file called foo.txt under the user's home directory, Perl always complains that there is no such file or directory. When I replace "~" with /home/jimmy (let's say the user is jimmy) then Perl give the right verdict. Could you explain why "~" dosen't work in Perl and tell me what is Perl's way to find a user's home directory? ~ is a bash -ism rather than a perl -ism, which is why it's not working. Given that you seem to be on a UNIX-type