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

bash scripting tilde tilde-expansion
madiyaan damha picture madiyaan damha · Oct 18, 2010 · Viewed 80.5k times · Source

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 variable (call it $VAR), I get no such directory. I want to let bash interpret/expand this variable without executing it. In other words, I want bash to run eval but not run the evaluated command. Is this possible in bash?

How did I manage to pass this into my script without expansion? I passed the argument in surrounding it with double quotes.

Try this command to see what I mean:

ls -lt "~"

This is exactly the situation I am in. I want the tilde to be expanded. In other words, what should I replace magic with to make these two commands identical:

ls -lt ~/abc/def/ghi

and

ls -lt $(magic "~/abc/def/ghi")

Note that ~/abc/def/ghi may or may not exist.

Answer

Håkon Hægland picture Håkon Hægland · Dec 15, 2014

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}"

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