Shell Programming and Scripting

Does anyone know of a reliable method to disable tilde expansion while a script is running and then re-enable it when the script is done?

I often have to work with files that have sections like this in them:

Code:

555 ~~~~~~~~~~  AN:AutoAttendant~~~~~~~~~~~~
9195551212 ~~~~~  QU:CSQ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Occasionally, some of the ~'s will get expanded to something like this when I have to assign or manipulate a string that just so happens to start with a ~:

Code:

/myhomedir/myhomedir/myhomedir

I know this happens because of the default bash action to expand ~ into the homedir of the user the script runs as, which is great when you need it to happen, but it is really annoying when you would prefer that it not. The behaviour also seems to vary from one system to another, which can be further irritating when a script works on ServerA, but not on ServerB.

Thanks,

Jaimie

\~ will stop the expansion and works fine in bash, ksh or sh. Best idea is to get into the habit is excaping your tilde chars.

But on most systems with bash there is a hard link from /bin/sh to /bin/bash and if bash is run with the name sh it goes into posix mode and tilde will not be expanded.
So you can put #!/bin/sh at the top of your script.

===Edit===
This /bin/sh mode can also be forced by calling set -o posix and from the manual: