How to manually expand a special variable (ex: ~ tilde) in bash

Question

I have a variable in my bash script whose value is something like this:

~/a/b/c

Note that it is unexpanded tilde. When I do ls -lt on this

Answer 1

A safe way to use eval is "$(printf "~/%q" "$dangerous_path")". Note that is bash specific.

#!/bin/bash

relativepath=a/b/c
eval homedir="$(printf "~/%q" "$relativepath")"
echo $homedir # prints home path

See this question for details

Also, note that under zsh this would be as as simple as echo ${~dangerous_path}