alt Hacker NewsOr 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"`).
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Unless you're running a shell command from python. That was the first time I saw a command string broken down into "string" arguments for every thing like that.
People quote both too often and too little.
GENERAL RULE
1. Double-quote dollar sign expressions, and nothing else.
foo
"$bar"/foo
baz:"$(cat example.txt)"
exec cmd "$@"
'Die Hard'
'ke$ha'
I should point out that the author's example is NOT fixed by different quoting though.
# original
export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin/"
# without unnecessary quotes
export PATH="$PATH":~/.local/bin/
Or just stop using bash. It’s a terrible language to write and has tons of footguns.
The trick is to quote explicitly and correctly. “ and ‘ are different.
I think the appropriate method by POSIX rules would be:
export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin
Edit: this appears to work properly with mksh on my phone:
:/ $ export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin
:/ $ print $PATH
/product/bin:/apex/com.android.runtime/bin:/apex/com.android.art/bin:/system_ext/bin:/system/bin:/system/xbin:/odm/bin:/vendor/bin:/vendor/xbin:~/.local/bin
I feel like this is common knowledge and should not be worth mentioning. But then it apparently is not common knowledge, as the article proves.
Have I run into this at some point?
I certainly have.
Have I learned to quote better and only where appropriate from it?
I certainly have.
Bourne compatible shells take a while to learn and require some experience. This won't change, but alternatives exist, with their own caveats.