UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Code:

echo $HOME return : /home/user1

Code:

echo ~ return : /home/user1

Code:

My_path=~/bin/"some dir1/some dir2"
kate  "$My_path/some_file"

Kate open a file "~/~/bin/some dir1/some dir2/some_file" which does not exists.

I was expecting kate to open : "~/bin/some dir1/some dir2/some_file"

Any help is welcome.

PS

Without seeing the source for kate, we have no way to guess at what might be going wrong.

What operating system are you using?

What shell are you using?

Hello.

Shell : bash
Operating system : opensuse leap 42.2
Kate is KDE editor

Another example :

Code:

MY_PATH="~/bin/200_yast_install"
ls $MY_PATH
ls: cannot access '~/bin/200_yast_install': No such file or directory

Code:

MY_PATH=~"/bin/200_yast_install"
ls $MY_PATH
ls: cannot access '~/bin/200_yast_install': No such file or directory

I think is a " problem.

But if one have space in folder name, seems not to be able to use " with ~

Using tilda can be very tricky... Yes " will make the substitution fail.. the same goes for /~ but there is nothing stopping you to use " after the tild e.g.

Code:

 MY_PATH=~"/bin/200_yast_install"

Try

Code:

MY_PATH=~/"bin/200_yast_install"

When the tilde is quoted, it is a regular character and should not be expanded by the shell into your home directory. Therefore, the shell is behaving as expected for the above example.
The tilde here still isn't required to be expanded because the / following the ~ is quoted.

Note, however, that the sequences of commands:

Code:

MY_PATH=~/"bin/200_yast_install"
ls "$MY_PATH"

Code:

MY_PATH="$HOME/bin/200_yast_install"
ls "$MY_PATH"

should do what you want to do. (Note the use of double-quotes around the expansion of MY_PATH in the ls command. Without the quotes there, any spaces that had been quoted when you assigned the string to MY_PATH will be parsed by the shell into separate arguments for ls.

Expanding on what RudiC said...
The above rules apply whenever a ~ expansion is performed. In an assignment statement (and only in an assignment statement), any ~ up through and including the next following colon or slash, if there is one in the current word, must be unquoted for ~ expansion to occur. This allows multiple ~s to be expanded when setting the PATH, CDPATH and similar variables. Note also that the general format of a ~ expansion is any one of the three forms: ~logname, ~logname/, and ~logname: which will expand to the login directory for the user named logname on your system (followed by a colon or slash, respectively, in the last two forms). As you already know, if you omit logname in any of these forms the ~ expands to the quoted expansion of $HOME. ~ expansions only occur when ~ is the first character in a word except for the cases stated above in assignment statements.

I might be overly paranoid here, but using unquoted strings in shell scripts is asking for trouble. In this case the trouble would be that a home directory has a space char in it (which is very ill advised to do in first place, but if i would have gotten a penny for every idiotic decision i have seen on a system during my career i'd be stinking rich).

Here is an alternative approach: the file /etc/passwd contains the user names as well as the home directories and it is world readable. Its format is colon-separated fields forming records separated by newlines. The home directory is the fifth field, the user name the first. Hence:

Code:

#! /bin/bash

pGetUserHome ()
{
local chUser="$1"

grep '^'"$chUser"':' /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f6

return 0
}

# ------ main ()
local usershome=""

usershome="$(pGetUserHome "username")"
if [ -z "$usershome" ] ; then
     echo "user \"username\" does not exist"
else
     echo "home of \"username\" is: $usershome"
fi

exit 0

Similar with every other user attributes (primary group, login shell, ...).

I hope this helps.

bakunin