Or you can just…not quote the tilde. Folks always seem to reflexively quote “strings” in Bash while not realizing that (almost) everything is a string and most strings are not quoted and it would be odd to do it (e.g. no one is doing `"ls" "-a" "foo"`).
Unless you're running a shell command from python. That was the first time I saw a command string broken down into "string" arguments for every thing like that.
In that case, you're not running a "shell command" from python, you're passing arguments to exec. A shell command would be a string interpreted by the shell, and you'd use that for shell syntax things like having the shell do variable interpolation or redirections as part of executing the command.
They are typographically the right thing to have been using all along.
Using ' and " to pretend to be ‘/’ or “/” is on par with the typewriter days where people would use the l key to stand in for 1 also. A justifiable approximation when technology limitations prevented using the real deal, but an approximation all the same.
I wish Linux distros would ship a "Terminal"/"CLI" program etc that is decoupled from the scripting language. Have a universal Path env var that isn't tied to a specific shell. Lets you execute cd commands, launch python/git/cargo/arbitrary applications etc, and have a good bookmark + autocomplete system. It feels like the conflation of scripting language + CLI application is the root of these complications and subtleties.
If you are using shell scripting (And prefer Bash etc over Python), you would keep using Bash/Fish/Zsh etc. If you are using the CLI to launch applications that don't have a GUI, navigate directories and perform file system operations, then you would use the plain terminal.
I was going to say “it always seems to work for me” then I saw “… actually works in Bash and Zsh, because …”.
Another Bash-ism I need to be careful not to use when trying to be portable.
It is worth noting that on a lot of systems /bin/sh isn't bash (or zsh) so if you want to rely on Bashisms (or just can't be bothered looking for them) be specific and use “#!/bin/bash” for you hashbang. On Debian and similar it is usually dash for instance.
In most use cases, the bash scripts location is more important than $HOME. This is because it is resilient to changes in user in the session, and parent process current working location contexts. =3
In fish, you can just do `fish_add_path ~/.local/bin`. Adding a directory to your PATH is so common that there’s a function to do it. And it takes effect immediately in all running instances of the shell.
Afaik it's habit to give system paths precedence so a malicious script can't shadow e.g. sudo and steal your password, escalating a local file write into root
So many headaches could be avoided if we only allowed `[A-Za-z0-9._-]` in paths. (Arguably, even `-` can be problematic.) Encoding issues, expansion, parameter separation, ... and I never saw a convincing case in favor of supporting anything else.
The language I grew up with does use non latin letters, I can manage. Then again, it's only four of them, so I get your point ... but I can dream, can't I?
I always joked about setting a custom keyboard layout to replace the space char with the underscore char specifically for avoiding spaces in file paths.
Using ' and " to pretend to be ‘/’ or “/” is on par with the typewriter days where people would use the l key to stand in for 1 also. A justifiable approximation when technology limitations prevented using the real deal, but an approximation all the same.
The equivalent of l for 1 is doing font-specific pseudo smart quotes with ` and '
GENERAL RULE
1. Double-quote dollar sign expressions, and nothing else.
2. Single-quote words with a special character, and nothing else. ---I should point out that the author's example is NOT fixed by different quoting though.
Because tilde expansion happens at the beginning of the word.If you are using shell scripting (And prefer Bash etc over Python), you would keep using Bash/Fish/Zsh etc. If you are using the CLI to launch applications that don't have a GUI, navigate directories and perform file system operations, then you would use the plain terminal.
I'm not sure why this can't be done. Security people will have a million reasons, I guess it's possible one of them might be valid.
It sounds like you could make it yourself in ~10 lines of Python or bash. I don't see it catching on, though.
Another Bash-ism I need to be careful not to use when trying to be portable.
It is worth noting that on a lot of systems /bin/sh isn't bash (or zsh) so if you want to rely on Bashisms (or just can't be bothered looking for them) be specific and use “#!/bin/bash” for you hashbang. On Debian and similar it is usually dash for instance.
That was a scary mistake to unwind!
Tilde expands when at the beginning of an unquoted word.
Pretty straightforward.
---Bash has a few extra.
scriptPath=$(/usr/bin/realpath "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")
localPath=$(/usr/bin/dirname "$scriptPath" )
/usr/bin/echo "localPath = '$localPath'"
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/bash /usr/bin/footgun
Also, if something can write into your path, it can probably write to your shell config and/or the environment variables.
I've always seen home dir, homebrew, etc prepending to PATH.
The (classical) Latin alphabet can be fully described by the English alphabet.