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

why not delve straight into getting the user's home directory with getent?

$ getent passwd mike | cut -d: -f6
/users/mike