Setting working directory: Julia versus R

Question

In R, starting from any working directory, I can do

setwd("~/Desktop")

and this is consistent with how my linux distribution interprets cd at the command line. But Julia does not seem to recognize the ~/ notation:

julia> cd("~/Desktop")
ERROR: chdir ~/Desktop: No such file or directory
 in systemerror at error.jl:38
 in cd at file.jl:13

Is this a bug?

Answer 1

The idiom is just different as you can see from the source. If you invoke cd() without arguments, it defaults to the home directory. The function homedir() can be used to prepend the home directory.

julia> homedir()
"/Users/jeffw"

julia> cd("/")

julia> pwd()
"/"

julia> cd()

julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw"

Combining things

julia> cd("$(homedir())/Desktop")

julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw/Desktop"

Answer 2

The problem is that Julia doesn't expand the ~. You need to manually provide the full path. This is being worked on, but I'm on my phone right now and can't find issue.