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

Just use eval correctly: with validation.

case $1${1%%/*} in
([!~]*|"$1"?*[!-+_.[:alnum:]]*|"") ! :;;
(*/*)  set "${1%%/*}" "${1#*/}"       ;;
(*)    set "$1" 
esac&& eval "printf '%s\n' $1${2+/\"\$2\"}"