Expanding / Resolving ~ in node.js

Question

I am new to nodejs. Can node resolve ~ (unix home directory) example ~foo, ~bar to /home/foo, /home/bar

> path.normalize(\'~mvaidya\') 
\'~mvaidya\'
> path.resolve(         


        

Answer 1

The reason this is not in Node is because ~ expansion is a bash (or shell) specific thing. It is unclear how to escape it properly. See this comment for details.

There are various libraries offering this, most just a few lines of code...

• https://npm.im/untildify ; doesn't do much more than os.homedir(), see index.js#L10

• https://npm.im/expand-tilde ; basically uses os-homedir to achieve the same, see index.js#L12

• https://npm.im/tilde-expansion ; this uses etc-passwd so doesn't seem very cross platform, see index.js#L21

So you probably want to do this yourself.