Question

Java has the convienient System.getProperty("user.home") to get the user’s “home” directory in a platform-independent way. What’s the equivalent in Ruby? I don’t have a Windows box to play around with, and I feel like relying on tildes in filenames isn’t the cleanest way. Are there alternatives?

Answer 1

The File.expand_path method uses the Unix convention of treating the tilde (~) specially, so that ~ refers to the current user’s home directory and ~foo refers to foo‘s home directory.

I don’t know if there’s a better or more idiomatic way, but File.expand_path('~') should get you going.