Question

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?

Answer 1

What about

cd $(getent passwd foo | cut -d: -f6) 

and

USER=foo eval cd ~$USER 

works, too (foo is the username)