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

I have done this with variable parameter substitution after reading in the path using read -e (among others). So the user can tab-complete the path, and if the user enters a ~ path it gets sorted.

read -rep "Enter a path:  " -i "${testpath}" testpath 
testpath="${testpath/#~/${HOME}}" 
ls -al "${testpath}" 

The added benefit is that if there is no tilde nothing happens to the variable, and if there is a tilde but not in the first position it is also ignored.

(I include the -i for read since I use this in a loop so the user can fix the path if there is a problem.)