How do I use '~' (tilde) in the context of paths?
Solution 1:
it is your $HOME
var in UNIX, which usually is /home/username
.
"Your home" meaning the home of the user who's executing a command like cd ~/MyDocuments/
is cd /home/user_executing_cd_commnd/MyDocuments
Solution 2:
Unless you're writing a shell script or using some other language that knows to substitute the value of $HOME
for ~
, tildes in file paths have no special meaning and will be treated as any other non-special character.
If you are writing a shell script, shells don't interpret tildes unless they occur as the first character in an argument. In other words, ~/file
will become /path/to/users/home/directory/file
, but ./~/file
will be interpreted literally (i.e., "a file called file
in a subdirectory of .
called ~
").
Used in URLs, interpretation of the tilde as a shorthand for a user's home directory (e.g., http://www.foo.org/~bob
) is a convention borrowed from Unix. Implementation is entirely server-specific, so you'd need to check the documentation for your web server to see if it has any special meaning.
Solution 3:
If you are using pathlib for filenames then you can use on both Windows and Linux (I came here for a windows answer):
python
from pathlib import Path
p = Path('~').expanduser()
print(p)