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  • I was going to say “it always seems to work for me” then I saw “… actually works in Bash and Zsh, because …”.

    Another Bash-ism I need to be careful not to use when trying to be portable.

    It is worth noting that on a lot of systems /bin/sh isn't bash (or zsh) so if you want to rely on Bashisms (or just can't be bothered looking for them) be specific and use “#!/bin/bash” for you hashbang. On Debian and similar it is usually dash for instance.

    by dspillett
  • Not necessarily about tildes but about some of the craziness that can happen with bash at large orgs:

    At a past job, I was trying to figure out what part of my basrhc was setting a particular environment variable. I assumed that it must be some kind of default installed in my user profile and/or inheriting from /etc/<something>.

    I realized pretty quickly that my bashrc was importing some other files. Again, the assumption was that this would be one file deep in the import.

    It turned out there were 10+ layers of import starting from an "ur-bashrc" and then layer upon layer of more and more imports to finally get to a user level profile.

    It was so convoluted that I was going nuts until I found this Stack Exchange post: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/813/how-to-determin...

    It turns on "tracing" for bash imports so that you can then narrow down on where the env variable is getting set.

    by alexpotato
  • You can just do:

      PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH
    PATH is already exported. Quotes are also not necessary for assignments.
    by thefilmore
  • Kind of seems like you should have noticed this by your ~/.local/bin PATH not working?
    by FeepingCreature
  • I refuse to let knowledge about Calvinball-level grotesque rules about quoting and escaping in bash encumber my mind.
    by nlehuen
  • I've always wondered if bash/zsh/etc should have a "strict path" setting.

    Meaning everything in the path should resolve to sane stuff, like no relative paths, don't allow PATH=.:$PATH and no literal '~' characters (or even space/etc?) maybe check all are directories and exist.

    by m463
  • I never use tilde in scripts, only as a convenience when typing commands interactively.

    $HOME otherwise, which still has gotchas but they are the same as any other environment variable.

    by SoftTalker
  • Or you can just…not quote the tilde. Folks always seem to reflexively quote “strings” in Bash while not realizing that (almost) everything is a string and most strings are not quoted and it would be odd to do it (e.g. no one is doing `"ls" "-a" "foo"`).
    by amarshall

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