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

Here's my solution:

#!/bin/bash


expandTilde()
{
    local tilde_re='^(~[A-Za-z0-9_.-]*)(.*)'
    local path="$*"
    local pathSuffix=

    if [[ $path =~ $tilde_re ]]
    then
        # only use eval on the ~username portion !
        path=$(eval echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
        pathSuffix=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
    fi

    echo "${path}${pathSuffix}"
}



result=$(expandTilde "$1")

echo "Result = $result"