[ILUG] YABO (Yet another bash oddity)

[Niall O Broin]

Given this little script called homedir

#!/bin/sh
echo ~$1

I expected homedir niall (or whatever) to return /home/niall (or whatever).
However, t'ain't so. A little R'ing of the FM revealed the reason to be that
tilde expansion is performed BEFORE variable expansion, and this is
apparently not negotiable. Any bash geniuses out there able to figure out a
neat way around this ? Bear in mind that what I need to do is find a user's
home directory in a script, and a little bit of awk will do it for me, so
exceedingly complex solutions don't get any cigar.


Regards,

Niall