Re: Get Cygwin home directory path for current user

[Eric Blake <eblake at redhat dot com>]

On 2/14/19 2:22 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 12:49 PM Eric Blake wrote:
> 
>> Depending on the shell, ~ is expanded to $HOME prior to invoking a
>> program. But if you want to take the shell's expansions out of the
>> equation, you could use:
>>
>> cygpath -w "$HOME"
> 
> Ah. I'm not using a Cygwin shell (PowerShell actually). So the
> expansion happens before cygpath sees it, which is why it works in a
> Cygwin shell but not directly from Windows...
> 
> So therefore I can write
> 
> dash -c '/bin/cygpath -w ~'
> 
> To get it, but this seems a bit roundabout and awkward.
> 
> Is there any way to do it more directly from a Windows shell?

If you want tilde-expansion to happen, you have to use a shell that does
tilde-expansion. bash and dash do, PowerShell does not.  It is not
cygpath's fault, but your choice of shell, that determines whether ~ is
expanded.  And, since the tilde-expansion of ~ is $HOME, and PowerShell
_does_ support $HOME, use $HOME instead of relying on tilde-expansion.
(The expansion of ~user is a much harder nut to crack - for that, you
really do depend on a shell doing proper tilde-expansion, as there are
no easy shortcuts)

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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