[Chapter 14] 14.11 Finding (Anyone's) Home Directory, Quickly
Author: Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Date: 1998-08-04T21:37:11Z

#

| Chapter 14 Moving Around in a Hurry |

## 14.11 Finding (Anyone's) Home Directory, Quickly

The C shell, ksh and bash have a shortcut for the pathname to your home directory: a tilde (`~`), often called "twiddle" by UNIX-heads. You can use `~` in a pathname to the home directory from wherever you are. For example, from any directory, you can list your home directory or edit your .cshrc file in it by typing:

>     % ls ~
>        ...
>     % vi ~/.cshrc

Bourne shell users - try the `$HOME` or `$LOGDIR` variables instead.

You could change your current directory to your home directory by typing `cd ~` or `cd $HOME` although all shells have a shorter shortcut: typing plain `cd` with no argument also takes you home.

If your shell understands the tilde, it should also have an abbreviation for other users' home directories: a tilde with the username on the end. For example, the home directory for mandi, which might really be /usr3/users/mfg/mandi, could be abbreviated ~mandi. On your account, if Mandi told you to copy the file named menu.c from her src directory, you could type:

>     % cp ~mandi/src/menu.c .

Don't confuse this with filenames like report~. Some programs, like the GNU Emacs (32.4) editor, create temporary filenames that end with a `~` (tilde).

The Bourne shell doesn't have anything like ~mandi. Here's a trick that's probably too ugly to type a lot - but it's useful in Bourne shell scripts, where you don't want to "hardcode" users' home directory pathnames. This command calls the C shell to put mandi's home directory pathname into $dir:

>     username=mandi
>     dir=`csh -fc "echo ~$username"`

The tilde is a good thing to use in your shell setup files (2.2), too.

- JP

14.10 Variables Help You Find Directories and Files |  | 14.12 Marking Your Place with a Shell Variable