In my bash script I need to change current dir to user's home directory.
if I want to change to user's foo home dir, from the command line I can do:
cd ~foo
Which works fine, however when I do the same from the script it tells me:
./bar.sh: line 4: cd: ~foo: No such file or directory
Seams like it would be such a trivial thing, but it's not working. What's the problem here? Do I need to escape the "~" or perhaps missing quotes or something else?
Edit
when I say user I don't mean current user that runs the script, but in general any other user on the system
Edit
Here is the script:
#!/bin/bash
user="foo"
cd ~$user
if username is hardcoded like
cd ~foo
it works, but if it is in the user variable then it doesn't. What am I missing here?
What about
cd $(getent passwd foo | cut -d: -f6)
and
USER=foo
eval cd ~$USER
works, too (foo is the username)
Change it to:
cd $HOME
Actually, I'm not sure why cd ~whatever
wouldn't work. I've just tested with a small script and it worked fine:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~sbright
I actually get the same error message that you do when the specified user does not exist on the system. Are you sure (and yes, I know this is one of those is-it-plugged-in questions) that the user exists and has a valid home directory specified?
Edit:
Now that I see what you are actually doing... tilde expansion happens before variable interpolation, which is why you are getting this error.
Is the script going to be run by the user? If it is you can just do:
cd ~
Is there some reason you can't do:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/$USER
Of course directories aren't in /home on all *nixes, but assuming you know what OS/distro your script is targeted for, you should be able to come up with something that works well enough.