UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

I agree that having <space>, <tab>, or especially <newline> in a directory (or any file) name is a bad idea. But, if the pathname in the variable HOME (for ~ expansions) or if a user's home directory in the system's user database (/etc/passwd on many systems) (for ~logname expansions) contains spaces, periods, question marks, asterisks, square brackets, parentheses, or other characters that could cause field splitting or pathname expansions, tilde expansions should still work. The standards explicitly state:
But, of course, if a variable is set to something containing a tilde expansion, expansions of that variable still need to be quoted. If some idiot sets up a login directory named /home/my directory, login procedures will set:

Code:

HOME="/home/my directory"

for that poor user, but the command:

Code:

MY_UTILITY=~/"bin/my utility"

will set MY_UTILITY to the string /home/my directory/my utility. Having done that you can execute that utility with:

Code:

"$MY_UTILITY"

but trying to execute it with:

Code:

$MY_UTILITY

will attempt to run the command /home/my with arguments directory/my and utility (assuming default IFS settings).

As my question was how to quote string path when using ~ , thank you very much every body for helping