Re: Get Cygwin home directory path for current user

[Vince Rice <vrice at solidrocksystems dot com>]

> On Feb 14, 2019, at 4:52 PM, Bill Stewart <bstewart@iname.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 3:14 PM Vince Rice wrote:
> 
>> There is -- use a cygwin shell. As Eric has already explained, expansion is the
>> shell's responsibility. Powershell doesn't do it. If you want expansion, use one
>> that does.
> 
> So let's consider, for a bit, that not everybody uses a Cygwin shell.
> (Hard to believe, perhaps, but PowerShell is really quite good.)
I didn't suggest everyone did. But people who want tilde expansion do, because it's
the shell that is responsible for tilde expansion.

> For interoperability's sake, it is useful to get this path from the
> Windows side, and this seems oddly absent.
No, it isn't "oddly" absent. As has been said repeatedly in this thread, tilde expansion
is the responsibility of the shell. Cygwin has nothing to do with it. The *shell* does
it.

> Cygpath already has a set of flags for returning system information
> directories, such as -H, which returns the path to the user profile
> directory. (As I noted previously, this is not always the same as ~
> when expanded in a Cygwin shell.)
Those "system information directories" are *Windows* directories. Completely different
thing.

> As I noted previously, yes, the below works:
> 
> dash -c '/bin/cygpath -aw ~'
> 
> However, this seems awkward and requires a Cygwin shell (why should
> that be a prerequisite?).
Because, repeat after me, IT'S THE SHELL THAT DOES THE EXPANSION!
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