How do I use '~' (tilde) in the context of paths?

Question

I'm a web application development noob. I have a function that opens a file and reads it. Unfortunately, the directory structures between the test and production servers differ. I was told to "use a path relative to ~". I haven't been able to find any resources on the '~', though!

How do I use the tilde character in the context of paths?

EDIT: This is in Python. I fixed the problem, using os.path.expanduser('~/path/in/home/area') .

Answer 1

it is your $HOME var in UNIX, which usually is /home/username .

"Your home" meaning the home of the user who's executing a command like cd ~/MyDocuments/ is cd /home/user_executing_cd_commnd/MyDocuments

Answer 2

Unless you're writing a shell script or using some other language that knows to substitute the value of $HOME for ~ , tildes in file paths have no special meaning and will be treated as any other non-special character.

If you are writing a shell script, shells don't interpret tildes unless they occur as the first character in an argument. In other words, ~/file will become /path/to/users/home/directory/file , but ./~/file will be interpreted literally (ie, "a file called file in a subdirectory of . called ~ ").

Used in URLs, interpretation of the tilde as a shorthand for a user's home directory (eg, http://www.foo.org/~bob ) is a convention borrowed from Unix. Implementation is entirely server-specific, so you'd need to check the documentation for your web server to see if it has any special meaning.

Answer 3

如果您使用pathlib作为文件名，那么您可以在Windows和Linux上使用（我来这里是为了获得Windows答案）：

python from pathlib import Path p = Path('~').expanduser() print(p)